Picked up A Move­able Feast, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye today. I’ve not read any of them before, not even in high school. This tends to amaze peo­ple when I tell them that fact. I guess my high school didn’t have a very good curriculum.

I’m not read­ing them just to read them. Well, mostly. But one piece of advice I remem­ber about writ­ing is that it’s not only impor­tant to write often but to read often. Which makes sense. That said, I’m going to read more than epic fan­tasy books I’ve read a dozen times already. I’ve read some of Hemingway’s short sto­ries before, and may have read bits of Old Man and the Sea in high school, but A Move­able Feast is my first novel. I came across this quote early on:

“All you have to do is write one true sen­tence. Write the truest sen­tence you know.”

That sounds like good advice.

Bryan’s memo­r­ial is today. I didn’t go.

I’m not a fan of memo­ri­als or funer­als. (I know no one is a fan of funer­als, really. It’s just a phrase I use to indi­cate my pref­er­ence or lack thereof for one thing or another.) I know the point is to gather and share your grief with those who have also lost a friend or loved one. To divide and reduce your sad­ness through the mys­ti­cal math­e­mat­ics of human emo­tion. Stand­ing in small knots, sto­ries are swapped that make you laugh, laugh­ter that ends in an awk­ward silence that says you’ll never have any more of those sto­ries to tell.

How do you say good­bye to some­one you’re never going to see again? Cer­tainly that word is not enough. It’s a con­trac­tion of God be with ye. Seems kind of a point­less thing to say now. I think the hard­est part of death is com­ing to grips with the final­ity of it all. There really is noth­ing else in this world as final, as def­i­nite, as com­plete as death. Also, there aren’t many things that will cause a per­son to wax philosophical.

I’ve had my tears. I’ve shared a moment of grief. All that’s left is to sit here in Star­bucks, fin­ish my memo­r­ial vanilla latte, and remem­ber the good times.

Good­bye, Bryan. I’ll see you later.

Jon Forde. August 13^th, 2007.
Jere­miah Mac­Neal. April 6^th, 2008.
Bryan Rearick. August 24^th, 2010.

At least the uni­verse had the good grace to skip a year.

Going to war does a lot of things to you. Arguably the best thing, if you can say such a thing, is that you come back with peo­ple who will for­ever be your friends. No, more than that. Broth­ers. Closer than fam­ily. It’s not some­thing that can be accu­rately described to some­one who hasn’t expe­ri­enced it. You could go 10 years with­out see­ing a guy and you’ll fall right back in where you left off. Because you have that one mon­u­men­tal shared expe­ri­ence. It never goes away. You’re always brothers.

And now I’ve lost another one.

I won­der if it gets any eas­ier. Get­ting that phone call (which, by the way, I’ve received from the same guy all three times), hear those words, feel­ing that ini­tial shock. In Bryan’s case, the shock was made greater by the cir­cum­stances: he had a heart attack at 34. I saw him not three weeks ago at a wed­ding and he seemed fine. He was fine. He was his nor­mal, sar­cas­tic self, smok­ing cig­a­rettes and blow­ing the smoke out of his nose because he said it hurt his throat. His fiancée was there. They were happy together.

I heard an Ozzy song on the radio when I left work yes­ter­day. I thought to myself, Why not take Ozzy? He’s old. He’s had a good life. Or Chad Kroeger. He sucks, you know? Not that I wish death on any­one but in times like these, I think we’re allowed to be a lit­tle selfish.

Yes I under­stand that every life must end
As we sit alone, I know some­day we must go
I’m a lucky man to count on both hands
The ones I love…

(“Just Breathe”, Pearl Jam)

Yes­ter­day started off fairly typ­i­cal. It fin­ished quite atyp­i­cal. But by the end of the night, I’d crossed a scooter mile­stone, helped my fel­low man, and earned twenty bucks.

Mon­day is craft beer night at my usual water­ing hole and even though I tend to drink PBR most of the time (shut up, it won a blue rib­bon), I can usu­ally count on see­ing a few friends there. Plus, the tuna steak was really good. It also gave me a chance to ride my scooter. I’ve had it for 2 weeks now and I’m work­ing on break­ing in the engine so I can go for longer rides. I took a longer route out there than nec­es­sary but when you’re on two wheels, it’s all about the jour­ney. Plus, I was so close to 100 miles I could taste it.

Sadly, I didn’t break triple dig­its on the ride out there. It was right around rush hour and down­town Nor­folk dri­vers aren’t the most cour­te­ous when you’re in a car. Imag­ine one of them get­ting stuck behind a 50cc scooter that will do the speed limit but takes a bit to get there. (Side note: dri­vers should start get­ting used to this sce­nario. Scoot­ers are get­ting more pop­u­lar all the time. Yes it may be “just a scooter,” but it is still a street legal motor dri­ven vehi­cle and should be treated as such. Not that peo­ple treat motor­cy­cles with any more respect, but that’s another story. Just, please, watch out for the scoot­ers.) By the time I got close to the bar, I needed to get off the street, rather than tak­ing a tour of down­town like I was planning.

My time at the bar was, as I said, typ­i­cal. I saw friends, we talked, we joked, some friends left, other friends came in. One of my band mates stopped in and we made plans to get together this week­end for prac­tice. (“Prac­tice” is used loosely as we haven’t played together as a band in some months.) I got the inside scoop about a posi­tion open­ing up at a com­pany to which I’d pre­vi­ously applied but was passed over for some­one with more expe­ri­ence. I had a con­ver­sa­tion with a female friend about friend­ships between men and women (which, despite what my mom says, can exist). All in all, a usual night out for me. Then I left.

Since I hadn’t hit 100 yet I decided to take another ride to a bird and wild­flower sanc­tu­ary way out in west Ghent. The sanc­tu­ary is closed after 6:00 pm but beyond it there is a small park­ing lot next to the Nor­folk South­ern lines. I fig­ured I’d sit, smoke a cig­a­rette, and maybe watch some trains. Which I did do for a few min­utes. Then I heard some­one approach­ing from the field to the right.

He was walk­ing a bicy­cle along a paved path that ran through the field and shout­ing some­thing. I couldn’t hear him over the trains. When he got closer he had what looked at first like a tat­too on his face. Some lines run­ning down from his eye to the front of his neck. He got closer and I could hear what he was saying.

“Man, I must look like shit, huh?”

Then I saw that it wasn’t a tat­too, it was blood.

“Uh, yeah.”

Appar­ently he’d run into a tree branch on his bike. It caught his eye­brow pretty good. Hav­ing some first aid train­ing I took a look but couldn’t tell much because of the blood. There was quite a bit of it. Then I asked him if he was going to stick around, he said yes, and I hopped on my scooter and made for 7 – 11 to get some things. I grabbed some water, band-aids, wipes, and Purell (mostly for me), cleaned him up best I could then was on my way.

What struck me later was that I didn’t think twice about doing all that. There wasn’t an inter­nal strug­gle, I didn’t once think that I shouldn’t help this guy. I just did it. I didn’t feel in any imme­di­ate dan­ger. He was appar­ently home­less and wait­ing for his dis­abil­ity to be approved. I say appar­ently because he did, oddly, have a cell phone, while at the same time say­ing his pack was in the woods nearby. Regard­less, I took the time and money to help out my fel­low man, and that made me feel good. The last thing I heard was that he was going to walk to Sen­tara to get him­self looked at. I don’t know if he did or not.

Then, when I got back to my apart­ment, I was putting my scooter up and a guy walked from the next build­ing over and asked if I could help carry a TV up to their apart­ment since it was too heavy for him and his wife. I fig­ured I’d keep the good deeds rolling and did help him. He offered me a gin­ger beer and when I turned that down, he offered me twenty bucks and wouldn’t let me decline it, which I tried. Based on that action, his name, and his wife’s accent, I believe they Mus­lim. Or at least of some mid­dle East­ern descent, despite com­ing from some­where in Michi­gan. They were nice people.

So that’s how my night went. Started out nor­mal, ended up pretty weird. But hey, I gar­nered some good karma, I got twenty bucks, and I passed 100 miles on the scooter.

Word count: 911

It’s weird that I’m already think­ing about NaNoW­riMo. I’ve tried, on and off, for I don’t know how many years, with vary degrees of suc­cess, none of which have been ter­ri­bly note­wor­thy. I’ve always been par­tic­u­larly inspired by the “one day” nov­el­ist descrip­tion of NaNoW­riMo. As in, “one day, I’ll write a novel.” Writ­ing a 50,000 page novel in a month, with scores of other writ­ers doing the same, is sup­posed to get peo­ple from “one day” to “The End!” Unfor­tu­nately, I never got that far. In fact, I always did rather abysmally. With nei­ther plot nor char­ac­ter, I’d floun­der for the first few days then give up. Not to men­tion I thought my writ­ing was ter­ri­ble, forced and ugly.

Then, there was The Num­ber. Most NaNo vet­er­ans know it by heart. One thou­sand, six hun­dred and sixty-seven. 1,667. The amount of words you have to write, each day of the month, to clear 50,000 by the time mid­night on Novem­ber 30^th comes around. It doesn’t look like much, does it? In fact, that’s the point. Com­pared to 50,000, it’s down­right tiny. Then I look down below this text box I’m typ­ing in now and see my cur­rent word count: 194. That’s just 11.6% of 1,667. I’m not exactly sure how long I’ve been typ­ing but I do know what thing: I have no idea what I’m going to fill the other 88.4% with. And this is just day one! Twenty-nine more days of 1,667 words. That’s impossible!

Well, of course it’s pos­si­ble. 32,178 peo­ple did it in 2009. The web­site is full of forum posts with tips and tricks and what­not. There are writ­ing chal­lenges and word wars (head to head bat­tles to write the most in a given time period). Writ­ing prompts, plots and char­ac­ters that need adop­tion, and more. Every­thing you need to get going. Except for one thing.

The desire to sit down and write.

I really want to do it this year. I don’t know why. (It could have some­thing to do with watch­ing Won­der Boys yes­ter­day. It’s a great movie, I rec­om­mend it.) I couldn’t tell you what’s dif­fer­ent between this year and all the other years I’ve said I was going to do it and fiz­zled out on day three. To get started, I’m going to start writ­ing here more. I’m look­ing at it as train­ing for a run. You can’t expect to hop off the couch and run a 5k with­out risk­ing death or shin splints. So, I’ll start here. Counter is cur­rently up to 393. That’s nearly a quar­ter of the required 1,667. It’ll prob­a­bly be hard to come up with top­ics, and I’m sure I’ll for­get some days since I have a ter­ri­ble mem­ory, but I’m going to try. And this year, I have a net­book I can take with me to places other than my messy room. Per­haps a change of venue will help me churn out the words.

The thing I have to tell myself the most is that even if I type out 50,000 words of crap, it’s still an accom­plish­ment. I will still have wrung 50,000 Eng­lish words, in some con­fig­u­ra­tion, from my brain via my fin­gers. And if they’re any­thing like that last sen­tence, they will be utter crap. What­ever. There’s always NaNoEdMo.

Word count: 514