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Sword and Laser was having a contest for who could make up the best first line for a science fiction or fantasy story. I’m not much of a contest guy, but was inspired to make up a few on my own.

1. The sky, in fact, was the limit.
2. It was a good date, even with the burned out transistors.
3. They were not his keys.
4. My brother turned to smoke and receded into the vent with my $20.
5. It wasn’t a new car, but there was no reason for all the dashboard lights to begin flashing in unison.
6. There was a reason the TARDIS had only one seat belt.
7. Backing away from the sink, Jim realized not only had he forgotten his cat’s name, he’d forgotten having a cat altogether.
8. I closed the door and went to wishing I could see her one more time to praying I’d never see her again.
9. Looking at the severed thumb, Jack wondered why there was no pain.
10. “So much for the steamships,” she sighed.
11. Who would have guessed a tomb could be so comfortable?
12. He threw the big yellow switch, but it was far too late.
13. I should not have been able to hear a pin drop.
14. All the billboards were different on my drive home.
15. The knobs and dials made as much sense as baby toys.
16. David glared at his younger self through the rifle’s scope.
17. Scott’s “To Do” and “Really Did” lists were not similar in any fashion.
18. I leveled my pistol at David Bowie’s head and ordered him to pick up every last fucking quarter.
19. John’s punishment was to count everything.
20. Steve could not find his pants, his wallet, or much of his memory of the previous night.
21. Looking back, I really should have questioned what a woman like that would see in a guy like me.
22. Jason grabbed second gear and disappeared.
23. As the last one out, it was my job to shut off the lights.
24. The phone rang and Alan’s extensive knowledge of Doctor Who trivia became instantly valuable.
25. I could swear the die teetered on twenty before falling through the vent.
26. Snapping Harry Potter’s wand in half, I turned directly to Brett Michaels and asked, “Who’s next?”
27. A guy who looked just like Ron Jeremy tailgated me all the way home with his battered S-10.
28. Somehow, Roger was the one who wound up inside the cage.
29. He could never get over just how moist time travel could be.

We had an earthquake the other morning. That’s not quite right. “We had an earthquake” sounds like “We rented 13 Going on 30″. Rather, the crust of the planet itself trembled several hundred miles away and we had very little to do with it at all.

So, we had an earthquake the other morning. My wife and I were lying in bed in those quiet few minutes after the alarm sounds. It was about twenty-five minutes of six. We do this every day, I think. The alarm sounds — a puny watch alarm, actually, as we have avoided a real alarm since the baby — and we lie there for a few minutes in silence. Sometimes we are both asleep, sometimes awake, mostly somewhere in between. It’s an odd in-between time as we move from the luxury of rest into the real world.

Even the dogs don’t want to get up.

But this particular morning, I felt the bed shaking. I tried to disregard it. This is Ohio. Maybe I was just having a seizure. Or maybe it was windy. But the slow back and forth rhythm became undeniable. An antique lamp on the dresser began to rattle the way old glass things do, reminding us that even ignored things are fragile.

Earthquake, I thought. And I have to admit the idea excited me a bit. It is Ohio, after all. But then I considered that the tremble might have been the remnant of California falling into the ocean. I found this a little less exciting. I tried to think about how humbling such an event is. How we are at the mercy of Big Things like tectonic plates and wandering comets. Then it was time to get up.

The earthquake was a five-point-nothing in Illinois, but the local news was geeked up. They were on the phone (*live*) with a witness who had felt the ground shake in Kentucky. The witness seemed a unimpressed by the whole event, much to the chagrin of the anchor. As he threw us to commercial, the anchor said after the break we would hear the forecast “for the city that was just rocked by an earthquake!” I guess that’s why he’s still the morning anchor. That and his giant ears.

So much for humility and awe at the universe.

And that’s my Cincinnati earthquake story.

Daily and recurring preoccupation: The all around book

I’ve slipped back into keeping a journal. I had a lot of arguments for quitting with the journal business. I was very convincing. But I was really just talking myself into something. My biggest gripe had been that the journal business was preventing me from writing anything useful. Turns out, I can come up with any number of excuses to avoid writing anything useful.

When it comes down to it, I enjoy keeping a journal. So I’m back. Writing, musing, recording the nuances of life I will find hilariously entertaining in ten years. Good stuff might go to the site. Other stuff just hangs there. The point is to keep my head working, creating. Maybe someday I’ll write something serious. Or maybe not.

Topic two involves the little daily notebook I carry around for lists and notes. For a long time, I held to a small moleskine notebook. But a couple of weeks ago I hit a singularity of sorts: 1) I filled up the book, 2) I got a job and would be spending considerably less time dicking around in front of my computer, and 3) I slipped into some kind of luddite/minimalist mode.

I’ve always felt more than a little guilt around a Franklin Covey binder in my desk. I’d paid way too much for it in 2004 and only used it for a short time. Perfect opportunity to revive it, no?

But the size is all wrong. And I am becoming increasingly preoccupied with keeping a manual calendar synced with my computer. How very 1998. And where is the line between work and personal lists, anyway?

I’ve sickened myself. This is ridiculous, bordering on madness. I hesitate to wonder what lies at the root of my preoccupation with personal organization. A desire to control a world out of control? A need to mark incremental progress in an unchangeable world? I think I’ll stop carrying a book.

How’s that for minimalism? How’s that for control?

An observation: perspective changes everything.

I was up north packing up the old house last week. Around noon, the potential buyer was coming over to review some things with the home inspector, so I thought it prudent to remove our nutty dogs from the premises for awhile. Also, it was time for lunch and I’d already finished off the bag of double stuf (TM) minto Oreos in the pantry.

So I loaded the dogs in the car and hit the road. I had an hour to kill and figured I’d pick up some food and drive around town. They’re had been a development boom of sort since we left and I wanted to see what changed.

I was driving my wife’s SUV, a necessary departure from my more fuel efficient car. You can’t fit many boxes in a compact car. Especially with two nutty dogs. I pulled into Wendy’s, treating myself to some fast food, and then set about exploring town.

Development in Ohio follows the same rules, the same restaurants crowding along the highway so that each exit is indistinguishable from the last. I was happy to see some non-franchise establishments cropping up here and there. I was also to see a little economic development coming to the little town that had lost so much commerce to Columbus to the south.

However, I found myself driving around town in a giant SUV while shoving trans-fat laden fast food in my face. Just driving and eating with no destination, killing time and emitting carbon. I didn’t see my action for what it was until a guy pulled up next to me in a Honda Insight hybrid at a traffic light. He was a young guy, fit and environmentally responsible. I was the portrait of American waste.

I wondered for a second if the universe was in danger, as if the close proximity of light and dark forces might create a black hole or something.

The I just shrugged, killed the rest of my Diet Coke, and pulled into a gas station.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Discard an axiom: Action almost always trumps inaction. The rule itself comes from 43Folders, but I feel it was one of those things that was always floating around in my head without having actual words put to it. Kind of like all those business and self help books (the line between the two is sometimes blurred) where you read some sage wisdom that is really just common sense put to different music. Still, I liked this nugget enough to write it down.

“Just keep moving” is all the rule says. It reminds me of another rule from a book about writing I read just after high school. Something about keeping your pen moving, even if you are writing trash. Action breeds progress. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I make a list of all the things I want to do. This cheers me up immediately. The world moves from one of dread to one of potential. I’m surprised at the power of a list of things to clean.

This idea is particularly applicable to video games. I used to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein with some co-workers at lunch. I’m currently in the running for the worst First Person Shooter player ever. I’m terrible. Lunch was always humiliating, but I kept at it, hoping a) I would improve, or b) I’d be up against at least one person worse than me. Neither happened. I got myself killed a lot by standing around.

You just have to keep moving.

My wife has done a pretty good job discarding this axiom for video games. We were playing Super Mario Galaxy awhile back and she would just stop and wait something out. To my shock, the tactic worked. No one from IT capped her in the back of the head. The giant floating mushroom head moved out of the way and she moved on.

I’ve tried to discard this axiom in the past when it comes to writing. I’ll quit with a journal or abandon a blog with the idea that I will be able to recharge, to renew. As if my writing muse feeds off of some limited bile within me that I must not deplete. This never works. Every time I start again, I’m a little more rusty. It takes a little longer to find my voice again. My muse feeds on momentum. If I stop, there is an increasing chance I will never start again.

Read a little differently, this axiom tells us to be a little more deliberate, a little less quick to jump in to something. Take some time to consider the path of the giant floating mushroom head before choosing your own course. But I am a deliberate person. If anything, I discard this action far too much. This is what I just learned about myself. Again.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Courage! Courage? Really? How many chances does the average guy have to demonstrate courage? I’m not talking about soldiers on the battlefront. Or Tibetan monks facing Chinese soldiers. Just normal American guys like me.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too many books about the apocalypse lately, but I’m starting to doubt my manliness. The most terrifying situation I find myself in these days is a job interview. And I think I’m getting a little better at these. Think about courage, about what it means to stand up for something, to perhaps give your life for something. This goes a lot further than walking down a dark corridor or snooping through an abandoned house. My tenth grade history teacher said the great thing about the American revolution was that “thirteen loosely organized colonies rose up to fight the number one military power in the world and won”.

That’s courage. I’m sitting here breaking down the cushion on the right side of our couch.

I don’t think I’m alone here. We’ve diminished as a culture. I’d say “consumers”, but would risk sounding like some kind of coffee shop beatnik. But it’s kind of true. We’re insulated, so far from pre-antibiotic hardships.

I feel a rant coming on here, so I’ll go another way.

We watched a couple of documentaries lately, Darkon and The King of Kong. Both movies made me think of courage a bit. At least what courage means in the twenty-first century first world.

Darkon follows a group of live action role playing gamers in Maryland. These are the folks who dress up in full fantasy garb and fight with foam swords and axes. I’ve seen these people in action, but didn’t know how deep the game went. It turns out there is an entire game world the players are experiencing. They fight these battles and wars for lands on an imaginary map. It’s complex: alliances, betrayals, politics. Like a lot of things, there’s a lot more going on once you start poking around.

The King of Kong follows a challenger as he attempts to become the world champion of Donkey Kong. Although it sounds like a simple feat (just get the highest score, right?), the challenge quickly becomes complicated. Alliances, betrayals, politics.

Here’s my point, so far as I can reason. We’ve become diluted. The average person doesn’t face much strife, does not ever face a challenge like previous generations. So people turn to other endeavors to try and win some of this back, to feel some sense of accomplishment. Perhaps it’s an elaborate fantasy game. Perhaps it’s a thirty year old video game. It doesn’t matter. The point is that these challenges are no less real and intimidating so long as the players are emotionally invested.

I’ve said before that I have a lot of respect for people who are way into a hobby. I say game on. Just do something, feel something.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly.

This is a hard thing to do any more. It’s 2008 and our pocket of the universe is enmeshed in electricity, cables and wires, roads, satellite feeds. As we lie in bed at night, the windows glow. Like the city itself emanates some blue power. I could crouch in the downstairs bathroom with a towel tied over my face. But people think that kind of activity is odd.

So, I lie there and listen. I can hear my wife’s soft breathing, the dogs snoring. The baby monitor hisses white noise from the humidifier in our son’s room. Outside, a dog barks and a car drives by: stereotypical neighborhood soundtrack stuff. Below these sounds, you can hear the low hum of civilization.

Even in our old house, home, there was no darkness. Our neighbor had a sodium vapor lamp atop his shed, giving our bedroom window a glow there, too. Last summer, the ballast in the lamp was burning up and it buzzed as we sat on the deck. But the land was dark aside from the neighbor’s lamp. On a clear night, if you put you hand up to block that light, you could see the wash of the Milky Way.

Once, when my wife was still my girlfriend, I stayed in the house alone with her dog while she traveled for work. He was a brute of a dog, two hundred pounds of Rottweiler. But friendly, of course. I’d let him out before going to bed and he wouldn’t come in. So I went to get him. In the darkest corner of the yard, far from the sodium vapor lamp, we met. I had a moment of fear, realizing there was no way for me to make it back to the house before he tore me to pieces. If he wanted to. He looked at me as if considering it.

Instead, he wagged his tail and bounced up to me like Tigger. He would let me live.

On the one lane road that often flooded, there was no hum of the city, of civilization. Occasionally, we could hear a motorcycle drive by. Or a peacock in the woods. Or a dog barking. There’s always a dog barking somewhere, isn’t there?

Houses line up behind us now instead of a cornfield. This leads to far fewer Children of the Corn nightmares. But more self-consciousness. In the back yard, you feel exposed to a hundred windows, a thousand eyes. A kid lives in the house behind us. He cuts across all the backyards on his way home from school. The dogs go nuts, barking and chomping at the door when he walks by, as if he is the advance guard of some invading force.

I wonder what that kid thinks of the neighborhood.

The baby sighs, one of the dogs passes gas. And we go on, sleeping in a protective cocoon of family, hiding from the blue glow outside.

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Ask my body? My body tells me I have a cold.

One of the the little surprises about being a parent is the dramatic increase in communicable diseases. This is one of the things no one tells you. Those without children may be shocked to learn that there is anything someone won’t tell you before the day arrives. Everyone has advice. Sleeping through the night, soothing croup, teething, whatever. You get a lot of advice.

At first, the advice is welcome, especially during the pregnancy. After all, this all you want to talk about for awhile. You’re excited. This is the most exciting time of your life. Nine months of anticipation, wondering what little person will emerge from your wife’s womb.

But it gets old. Eventually, you will tire of your neighbor’s aunt rattling off a home-brew concoction for baby shampoo. You nod and smile, but they know you’re not really listening. At this point in the cycle, you get the familiar admonishment: “You’re life is going to change”. A shit-eating grin usually follows.

By the time the nine months rolls around, most people think they know what they’re in for. But they’re wrong. You don’t really understand a three-hour feeding schedule or the compulsion to track daily bowel movements until you’ve been through it. But you figure it out. And then you forget.

Our son is almost a year old and I can hardly remember what it was like in that zombie-like state of fresh parenthood. It’s already hard for me to remember what he was like those first few months, tiny and helpless. Now he’s a fearless brute of a baby, continually grabbing for the dogs’ collars and climbing under tables. And, thankfully, sleeping through the night.

Sometimes I get glimpses of just how small he still is. When I’m changing his diaper, he will sometimes curl his legs in a way that would require me to dislocate hips and tear ACLs. It’s the fetal pose you see in the doctor’s office posters. He curls this way naturally, his body not yet deformed by adulthood. At these times I see how far away from growing up he is.

I think of my own body. In my head, I will always remain twenty-four. My body tells a different tale. I’m fitter than I was was a few years ago, but a much uglier beast than in high school. Hairier, and increasingly odder places. Teeth a little more yellow. Knuckles cracked from winter wind. A shoulder I can’t seem to keep in socket. Bad habits and misspent youth have all marked up this form of mine. I’m still a young man, not yet into my middle thirties. But I understand where my grandfather is coming from when he remarks about my son’s tiny white teeth.

Our pediatrician tells us that a baby in day care will get six to twelve illnesses in the first year. What he–and no one else–bothers to mention is that this means the parents will catch the very same six to twelve illnesses. It’s impossible to be in close contact with a little one and not catch the bug of the month. I hadn’t had a cold in two years prior to our son’s birth. Since then, I’ve had three. And somehow, Mono–a disease I thought you only caught from making out with girls in study hall.

So today, I cannot breathe through my nose or taste anything. The same old cold we all have throughout our lives. This is what my body tells me today. Tomorrow I will feel a little better and by the end of the weekend I will be back to normal. I will forget what it’s like to have a cold, much like I’ve forgotten how it was to survive on four hours of sleep in the early days. Next month, I will get this cold again.

I think of our little boy. Indeed, he’s less of a baby and more of a boy now. Small and perfect, he learns something about his body nearly every day. How to clap, how to wave, how to stand. We watch him grow, amazed at his journey. Every day we get a little glimpse of the little person he’s growing into. And we can’t wait for more. But in another way, I think of his little body and want him to stay this way forever. Perfect and fresh, unmarked and unhurt by the big world out there.

Your life is going to change, they said. This kind of thing must have been what they meant.

I love me some nutty weather. Often the cost is tragic, but bad weather reminds us that we are an arrogant civilization. I think we all need a slap in the face every once in awhile to keep us in our place. A slap from the cold hand of Mother Nature.

As a kid, I was always disappointed after a summer thunderstorm. I remember going outside with my dad after a particularly bad storm. I was seven or eight years old. The power was still out in the neighborhood and the intersections were flooded as the storm sewers struggled to process the deluge. The clouds parted and the sun popped back in full glory, filling the afternoon once again with wet ohio summer heat. There was a rainbow.

How lame.

I don’t much care for rainbows. It means the storm has passed. I prefer the tension before the storm, the chaotic wind of a passing weather front. A rainbow means the excitement is over. You don’t have to be afraid of the clouds. Go back to watching TV.

So we got some snow last weekend. Quite a bit of snow, actually. They call it a “blizzard”. This is something. Although local weather reporters jump all over any kind of inclement conditions, I note that they hold this word in reserve. Like if misusing the word causes the jet stream to cancel one scheduled tornado warning for your viewing area later that spring.

It’s March and we the sky just dumped more snow on us than we’ve had all year. This was unfortunate, especially for my step brother who had scheduled his out of town wedding for this weekend. Instead of celebrating with family and friends, we were stuck inside, watching the local news team dispatched to all corners of the city for an in-depth look at White Death 2008.

To children, snow means snow days and snow men and snow ball fights. As adults, we are conditioned to dislike snow days like this. Adults tend to think more in terms of longer commutes and shoveling-related coronaries. But there is a part of me that finds it all very exciting.

Here’s the thing: We have a media industry geared around self-help and control. Lose weight, find a mate, control your finances, curb your addiction. I myself spend a lot of time thinking about very geeky first world organizational problems. There’s a talk show guest and self-help section for every area. But it’s all a myth. There is no control. You can make lists and plan all you want. You may improve yourself a bit and become a little more efficient, but there is nothing in the universe that will prevent twenty inches of snow from falling on your wedding reception.

I don’t take pleasure from any of this, but I think it’s good to get a little perspective. The universe is a grand and chaotic beast. We are silly to think there’s anything we can do about it.

For the record, I spent my snow days re-reading Alas, Babylon. Maybe it’s time to make some supply lists for the next storm….

Just a few days following my anxious post pondering the futility and utility of keeping a journal, I started catching up on some Tivo’d episodes of Torchwood (warning: gratuitous flash). Lo and behold, the first episode I watch is one where the agency is infiltrated by an Alien who can alter memories. The guy sneaks in and makes everyone remember he was always there.

Pretty clever. I’d like to try that at my next job interview.

The interloper is ultimately caught because one of the team checks his diary and can find no mention of the new guy. So, perhaps I should view a journal not as remedy for instant amnesia or an egotistical artifact for my progeny, but as a defense against alien infiltration.

Scary to think my daily musings about cubicle life and poor drivers could one day save humanity.

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