Mostly written at age 17
Between the ages of four and six, a nightmare struck me every night my family and I stayed at my grandmother’s house in the country. The nightmare always consisted of the same characters and the same struggle. I still remember riding on those county roads thinking ahead to the creatures of my dream and the struggles that waited. During those years the thought of falling asleep in that room haunted me long after I was back in the comfort of our own home.
My grandma’s house sat at the very edge of a small town with a population under one hundred and fifty. After coming in through the front door came the living room, then the kitchen, and then a long hall that led to three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a closed-in back porch where the backdoor opened to barb wire pastures during the day and darkness at night. About halfway down the hallway my room stood alone, away from the rest of the world it seemed during the
My mom and dad would usually play cards late night with the rest of the relatives at the house, and they let me try to play with them or just watch. These games lasted pretty late so I could stay up longer than usual. Eventually I would go to bed not wanting to. Time moved so slow and my eyes seemed glued open as they stared at the entrance to the bedroom. I could hear my family talking and laughing while they played Hearts. Without realizing it, sleep would take over. The talking and laughter gave way to silence. I could feel it coming down the long hallway from the backdoor. My heart beat fast as I stared at the bedroom doorway. It looked something like a robot from an old science-fiction show. As always it just stood beside my bed but it scared the living daylights out of me. I tried to scream but nothing comes out but a hoarse whisper. The thing would then take me into the
Once in the hall, a robot-like human that floats instead of walking, comes from the backdoor. It floats down the long dark hallway straight towards me. The smaller robot laughs. Believing I am bigger than I am, I swing hard trying to land a right hook on the side of his head, but my arm moves in slow-motion. They take me into the room where my parents are sleeping. I scream and yell but they do not hear me. The robots make them float away and then do the same with my grandmother. Finally my desperate screams come out but everyone already floated away. The robots laugh and laugh, then they float away, still laughing. I finally awake. Around age six my screams become screams and the right hooks attack. My mom and dad never hear me yelling but it is enough to scare the dream demons away.
Maybe I won control by waking up just enough to get my feet on the ground. One way or another, the nightmares ended. For years it scared me to sleep in my grandma’s house. There was plenty of airy silence as I lay awake many nights listening to travelers pass by on the highway miles away, but the nightmares never came again. Every dream and every nightmare contain underlying meaning, or latent content. This is what the dreamer must discover himself. As I look back on my nightmare I wonder how much has really changed.
]]>What is going on? Over the past few years I have not given much attention to state politics (negligence), but somewhere in the background, just around the corner, anti-Paterson drums have beat incessantly. His approval rating remain impressively low while a demeaning tone generally infuse commentary and headlines. Without giving much thought I quietly assumed he was as the public perceived – the bane of the state.
The clamoring really kicked up another notch in early February when the Post and several other papers and blogs began bubbling about a big story the Times was working on – a bombshell that would finally bury the Paterson administration. I had to see for myself why the governor was being condemned. Looking through New York papers, journals, blogs, etc., it is practically impossible to not come away with the impression that Governor Paterson is incompetent, out of his league, and objectively incapable of running a government.
The tabloids take it to another level. Those who read the Post and Daily News must think Paterson is a village idiot who stumbled through life by virtue (welfare) of his blindness. Their attacks on the governorship have been pitiless and downright nasty. Yet, underneath all the exasperation I found very little that indicates scandal or egregious mismanagement. When he took office he admitted to having an affair while he and his wife were separated – hardly scandalous.
]]>Water trickles through soil and capillaries, underground streams and reservoirs, springs out in bogs and rivers, billows into waves and sprays itself into the air, dissipates, rains, and collects with the morning dew. There is no beginning or end. Three hundred twenty-six quintillion gallons of water in the earth and sky. A cubic meter of air might contain thirty grams of water. A cubic mile of fog might fill a gallon bucket.
]]>Earlier this year, Atlas & Co published a collection of essays written by twenty-one writers from twenty-one countries called How They See Us: Meditations on America. The overall perspective in the book sees from the outside with an insider’s ken since over half of the authors lived, taught, or spent substantial time in the U.S. This lends a more balanced perspective, perhaps, and a duality manifests itself without being psychologically conflicted. Nearly all of the writers are novelists or directly involved with creative literature, and rather than being didactic or accusatory or attempting to persuade their readers by argument, their personal narratives relate experiences, and Meditations becomes a fitting description.
]]>The man swings open the door of the 9th or 90th precinct and enters the small reception room. Beads of sweat slide down the side of his reddened face. Plastic chairs line the walls of the small empty room. Behind a thick pane of glass the clerk pecks at the keys of an electric typewriter. Behind her, a sprawling room of cops and cubicles.
The man waits and the clerk ignores him. Finally, she stops typing and chews on imaginary gum. “Yeah.”
“I need to report a missing person.”
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“It’s me.”
“Who’s the missing person?”
“I am.”
The man feels his skull about to crack under her glare. An instant before the two-inch glass shatters, she walks back and speaks to an officer. She returns and points for him to sit his ass down.
]]>The sun rises high above the tenements. The man opens his eyes. He lies belly-down on a cobblestone street with his arm pinned against a wall. He looks across the surface of the narrow lane and sees something like an ancient Tunisian neighborhood or Sicilian town with lava stone walls. A woman and child, faces browned by millennia of sun, stand silently at the center of his view. A hammer raps heavily on sheet metal.
The woman disappears and the shadows recede. As a loose pebble ripples a stagnant pool, something stirs the man’s dimmed mind: the boy watches him from a close but cautious distance. He lifts his head and rolls his stiff body off the wall. The boy keeps quiet and still, like a cat. The man pushes himself up to his hands and knees and lumbers clumsily to his feet while the woman hangs a full basket of laundry, walks inside, and returns with more. As he leans against the building a movement in the glass catches his eye. He turns and faces a strange man in the window, unblinking, face-to-face. The sun hits the corner of the window and the strange man fades to an apparition.
]]>This paradox has dramatically intensified over the past decade as an aggressive Christian political movement has grown more vocal in the public sphere. The loudest and most insistent voices are escalating a perception that to speak of Christian values in politics is to be self-righteous, narrow-bent, and devoid of compassion and tolerance.
]]>Perhaps that early desire was not necessarily the call to put words to paper. This is the age when we fantasize what we might do when we grow up – play football, race cars, fight fires, rescue, fly, shoot, spy – and I wanted to cruise the Mars Corridor, play pro football, and drive a Lamborghini and dump truck as much as anyone else, but somewhere in my eight-year-old imagination I also imagined a life of freedom and adventure, two fundamental qualities found readily in books.
Throughout my childhood years I wrote little pieces here and there, but rarely ever shared my secret, often dormant, writing aspirations. The only piece from my pre-adult years I actually remember is a narrative essay on a childhood nightmare Mrs. Lance made me rewrite so many times I was sure I was being punished for something (I was guilty as any 17-year-old boy). Perhaps through all of my grammatical free-styling and mishaps she saw potential, or just a teenager in need of discipline and structure. In the end, the essay we sculpted capped a long climb that broke my raw and elementary tendencies by reworking and rethinking until craft and structure breathed, until it was conscious, and did not merely mimic childhood authors.
]]>I continue along my way with heavy steps, clenched teeth, and a baseline of aggravation. The incident will repeat. Even at home the honking will rise up and cut through any barrier I erect. If you are not from New York you may think, what’s the big deal, honking is part of the city life. True. The city is loud. Sirens, delivery trucks, construction trucks, garbage trucks, street cleaners, busses and trains. You may get used to the constant rumble and drone of the traffic but the horns will still jar you with a hundred unrelenting decibels.
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