A Post about Shia LaBeouf

Everyone is talking about Shia LaBeouf, for some reason. Because he is being a jerk, or an asshole, I guess?  I don’t have much in the way of opinions on Shia LaBeouf, which is not to say I have none, but rather that my opinions are not so much about Shia himself and more about a vast web of subjective experience that is honestly far more interesting to me than whatever he is doing now.  So I am going to tell you my story about Shia LaBeouf.

The age at which I should have known, or rather cared, who Shia LaBeouf was, was precisely the age at which I did not know or care.  I am referring to his role on the Disney show Even Stevens, which I was not totally informed about since my family never had money for cable or satellite and I only caught the show after the fact, in syndication, on broadcast television.  Still, he existed as a nebulous presence for me, I suppose.

Since television, deprived of the benefits of cable, was not always enough to hold my interest, I also often took to reading.  I read widely and voraciously, and this was something noted about me in school.  When I was eleven and in the fifth grade, a teacher I admired very much asked if I would please read Louis Sachar’s YA novel Holes and share my opinions and experiences with her, because she was considering assigning it for the following year’s English class.

I was familiar with Sachar, primarily from the Wayside School series (grade school David Lynch, and probably a formative influence in those early years) and jumped at the change to read this new book, despite it having a synopsis that failed to tickle that same Wayside itch.

But I read Holes and I loved it, I highly recommended it be read in the future by any and all students.

It is very difficult for me to articulate now, through the gap of the years, precisely what is was that worked so well in Holes.  Part of it, I think, was that it managed to be completely absurd (in a more-subdued-than-Wayside School vein) while tackling some very serious issues (discipline, punishment, authority, race, family, legacy, ethical duty) in a way that did not feel condescending.  That might be rose-tinting, and it could fall away if I looked back too closely.  But I can recall with stone certainty at least one point on which the book captivated me.

The protagonist, a young boy named Stanley Yelnats, is fat.  He is overweight, unathletic, intelligent but not a genius, and bewildered by a world that supersedes the limits of his comprehension.  But the thing I want to stress here is: he is fat.  He is fat and he knows it, and he feels bad about it, outcast by this one other thing in addition to all the other crazy bullshit in his life.

I was a fat kid, and I knew it.  School acquaintances and family members commented on it in sometimes direct, sometimes sly and subtle ways.  I acted like this did not bother me, and performed this bit so well it eventually seemed like it worked, because while it’s not the best of all possible worlds I think it’s much easier to get through school with an abject body-type as a young man rather than a woman.

Stanley Yelnats and Holes provided the one precise instance I can remember reading a book as a kid and picturing myself in the hero’s position, seeing in the hero someone who was like me — not the bland, slim boys that populated the front lines of so many other adventure novels, but someone who was uneasy in the bulk of his own body, who wiped drops of sweat from the smeared lenses of his glasses, and who felt a vague malevolent pressure on him at all points in his life (for Stanley, this turns out to be a family curse; for me, the issue is a lot hazier).

So Holes got made into a movie in 2003, and when I first heard of this, even at the age of 15, I was at first excited about the prospect of seeing Stanley (who was, in my mind, basically me) onscreen.  But of course, as you well know, the Stanley I pictured and sympathized with was not the Stanley I got.

The Stanley I got — the Stanley we all got — was Shia LaBeouf.  Hapless, tousle-haired, lanky Shia, the embodiment of the bland and slim adventure hero-boy as he is available in the “slightly goofy” custom model.

I think the film version of Holes is actually pretty good, all things considered — the casting is actually pretty excellent, and even Shia LaBeouf brings his charisma (which we must remember he had, once).  But it never sat easy with me — never will sit easy with me — how the boy I pictured who was so much like myself was erased from his own story and replaced by the precise sort of person he (and I) was not.

But at least he’s not famous anymore, I guess.

2013 in review

Wow, what a year.

I skipped last year’s review because I felt like it was simultaneously too boring/stressful and I didn’t want to do a write-up, but then THIS year happened and it was simultaneously more boring and stressful than last year, so I figure why the hell not.

I finished my graduate coursework and will now be moving into qualifying exams, preparing my reading list for the summer for my oral exams in the fall.  I have wrapped up a very difficult semester of teaching, two sections for the first time, and after my department switched out the class I was supposed to be teaching in favor of something else only a few weeks before the beginning of the semester.

I made two games with the hypertext program Twine, and they were both pretty well liked by folks!  For reference, here’s a very flattering write-up Alex Pieschel did for my game Tower of the Blood Lord.  The second game, my father’s long, long legs, very nearly crashed my webhosting here and then actually did crash my webhosting, and courtesy of Peter Damien was featured on a website for people who read books instead of internet.  Emily Short wrote a very brief but thoughtful piece on it and I recently found out all-around Cool Chap Cameron Kunzelman included it on his GOTY list.

Interactive fiction — and games in general — have become much more important to me recently, as I find myself being very interested in 400 year old plays on the one hand and very new and weird digital things on the other.  The uniting factor, to rehearse the cliche, seems to be that “play’s the thing” — gameplay, shakespeareplay.  Or something.  Anyway I am continuing to press on this and what it means for me as an academic (which is my job) but also as a person who wants to be better at being a person, generally, and to make things that help others enjoy life and be people.

So thanks to not only the people I’ve linked here, but the people who’ve played my games, talked about them, shared them — and all the people who made the games I played and wrote the things I read that suggested to me that this was something I could and should do myself.

I am going to continue to work with twine.  It’s been a very therapeutic process for me in a lot of ways, allowing me to look at old memories askance, and to synthesize a lot of the information and theory I get from my work as an academic, but to put it towards ends that are in some ways more personally rewarding than simply writing a research paper.  2013 could probably be called the year I remembered to think about myself.

Also: this was the year I asked my girlfriend to marry me.  She said yes.  The date is a ways off — not until she finishes her grad program in another year and a half, at least.  But that’s certainly a thing that happened in my life, a very big and important thing, in a year that seemed to be filled with important things.

It was a tough year for a lot of folks. Next year might not be any better, but we’re all here right now. For a time, at least, we’re moving and saying things in a crazy multifaceted fully articulated material universe, and things just keep going.  So thanks for taking a moment out of your busy, fully articulated (but eternally obscured) schedule to read this, to read any of the words I’ve written on this blog, or elsewhere.  Best of luck next year.

I will end this post with a block quote.  Rather than provide any explication — apart from the fact that it is something I think about often — I will let it stand on its own, and perhaps its significance will become clearer in time to both you and me.  From The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton:

“What place can this be?” he asked. “Can it be the old devil’s house? I’ve heard he has a house in North London.”

“All the better,” said the Secretary grimly, planting a foot in a foothold, “we shall find him at home.”

“No, but it isn’t that,” said Syme, knitting his brows. “I hear the most horrible noises, like devils laughing and sneezing and blowing their devilish noses!”

“His dogs barking, of course,” said the Secretary.

“Why not say his black-beetles barking!” said Syme furiously, “snails barking! geraniums barking! Did you ever hear a dog bark like that?”

He held up his hand, and there came out of the thicket a long growling roar that seemed to get under the skin and freeze the flesh — a low thrilling roar that made a throbbing in the air all about them.

“The dogs of Sunday would be no ordinary dogs,” said Gogol, and shuddered.

THE BALLAD OF JAKE AND JOSH

OKAY SO I WENT TO SCHOOL WITH A PAIR OF TWINS, AND THEY WERE IDENTICAL AND THUS WENT THROUGH ALL THE TERRIBLE SHIT TWINS ARE SUBJECTED TO (ALLITERATIVE NAMES [JAKE AND JOSH], MATCHING OUTFITS UNTIL WE WERE IN LIKE THIRD GRADE OR SO) BUT EVERY SO OFTEN THEY WOULD USE THIS TO THEIR ADVANTAGE AND GO TO EACH OTHER’S CLASSES TO FUCK WITH TEACHERS AND STUFF.

THIS STORY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT.

INSTEAD I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS IN A BIOLOGY CLASS WITH THEM, THIS MUST HAVE BEEN SEVENTH GRADE. OUR TEACHER WAS THIS LANKY OLD MAN FROM FLORIDA NAMED MR. LELAND AND HE HAD BEEN TEACHING BIOLOGY SINCE HOOVER WAS PRESIDENT OR SOMETHING AND THOUGH HE’D BEEN LIVING IN THE MIDWEST FOR A MILLION YEARS HE STILL HAD HIS FREE-WHEELING FLORIDA ACCENT AND MANNERISMS. HE WAS PRETTY LIVELY, IS WHAT I AM SAYING.

SO FOR THIS BIOLOGY CLASS WE HAD TO DO VOCAB, BECAUSE THAT IS THE KIND OF POINTLESS SHIT YOU DO IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, AND THEN ON THE DAY THE VOCAB WAS DUE WE WOULD ALL GO OVER THE WORDS AS A CLASS WITH MR. LELAND LEADING.

ONE DAY WE GOT TO SOME WORD, I CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT, LET’S SAY RIBOSOME. AND MR. LELAND DRAWLS, “RIBAHZOHM, NOW WHICH ONE-A YA’LL CAN TELL ME WHAT A RIBAHZOHM IS,” AND HE THINKS FOR A SECOND AND POINTS AT ONE OF THE TWINS (LET’S SAY IT’S JAKE, BECAUSE SHIT IF I COULD TELL THEM APART).

AND JAKE, HE GETS THIS COMPLETELY MORTIFIED LOOK ON HIS FACE, WHICH YOU’D THINK WOULD MEAN HE DIDN’T DO THE ASSIGNMENT, BUT NOPE, HE BEGINS TO READ… SOMETHING.

IT’S COMPLETE NONSENSE, THEY’RE NOT EVEN WORDS, IT SOUNDS LIKE HE’S HAVING A SEIZURE OR HE’S A GODDAMNED PENTECOSTAL OR SOMETHING. NO ONE HAS ANY IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, AND MR. LELAND IS LIKEWISE FLABBERGASTED.

“WHAT YOU READIN?” HE ASKS.

“MY… MY DEFINITION,” JAKE REPLIES, HIS EYES FILLED WITH FEAR. “IT’S WHAT THE BOOK SAID.”

“LEMME SEE THAT.” MR. LELAND STROLLS ACROSS THE ROOM AND PICKS UP JAKE’S VOCAB SHEET — TWO AND A HALF PAGES, KEEP THAT IN MIND, THIS WAS TWO AND A HALF PAGES WORTH OF WORK — AND BEGINS TO FLIP THROUGH IT, MUTTERING TO HIMSELF AND ONLY LOOKING MORE AND MORE CONFUSED.

“WHAT IS THIS?” HE ASKS.

“IT’S WHAT MY BOOK SAYS!” INSISTS JAKE.

“SHOW ME,” SAID MR. LELAND, AND THEN HE LOOKS AT JAKE’S BROTHER JOSH: “IN THE MEANWHILE, CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT A RIBAHZOHM IS?”

“SURE,” SAYS JOSH, MORE THEN A LITTLE UNCERTAINLY, AND HE PROMPTLY BEGINS TO READ THE SAME SORT OF UNINTELLIGIBLE NONSENSE DEFINITION HIS TWIN HAD JUST READ.

BY THIS POINT JAKE HAS FLIPPED TO THE GLOSSARY IN HIS BOOK, BUT MR. LELAND AND THE REST OF THE CLASS ARE JUST STARING IN ABSOLUTE WONDERMENT AT THE TWINS.

WHAT. THE. SHIT.

AFTER A SECOND OR TWO OF SILENCE MR. LELAND LOOKS DOWN AT JAKE’S BOOK .

AND BEGINS TO LAUGH.

HE LAUGHS AND LAUGHS AND FOR A MOMENT WE’RE NOT SURE IF HE’S GOING TO LET US IN ON THE JOKE OR IF THERE’S SOME SORT OF CONTAGIOUS INSANITY SETTING IN, BUT THEN, WIPING AWAY A TEAR OF MIRTH, MR. LELAND EXCLAIMS, “BOY, YOU USED THE SPANISH GLOSSARY!”

A LOOK OF BEATIFIC COMPREHENSION DAWNS IN JAKE’S FACE. “OH!” HE SAYS.

JOSH, MEANWHILE, IS GLARING DAGGERS AT HIS BROTHER. “YOU IDIOT!” HE CRIES. “IF YOU WERE USING THE SPANISH GLOSSARY THEN WHY DID YOU LET ME COPY OFF YOU?

The Dad

When I was a kid my family had a dad.

We moved to a new house where the landlord, who was incidentally my grandfather, didn’t like the idea of dads on the property for fear of them ruining the screens in the windows and doors and so he ordered my cat to get rid of our dad.

One day while the rest of us were out, my cat secretly took our dad into the middle of a field far away and left him, and the cat told us dad had run away and we believed it.

A few years later we found some stray dads.

What happened this time, with the stray dads, is that they were smaller and weaker and more adorable, and there were in fact three dads, one each for me and my two sisters, and we played with them and named them and they were going to be ours forever.

And then one day, because our cat wouldn’t do it again, our grandfather came to the house and went into the shed where our dads were sleeping and he put them all in a sack with some stones and took the sack out into the woods and he dropped the dads in the river and drowned them.

I’ve since learned that back when our cat was young he never had a dad himself.

Even then our grandfather had taken bags of stray dads out into the wilderness and submerged them in creeks, ignoring the howling protests, and this taught my cat that it was okay to hurt living things in this way, though in retrospect, despite never standing up to our grandfather, it was perhaps significant the our cat only left our dad in the wilderness, able (in theory, though he never did) to find his way back to us.

I graduated a year ago

when i went to my alma mater’s graduation yesterday i was overcome with an intense feeling of mixed nostalgia and incredible sadness, because as i watched all of my friends who were only a year younger than i grab their little pieces of paper and pose smilingly  it occurred to me that so long as i didn’t visit the campus, so long as i didn’t see this happening, i could have maintained a little fantasy in my head that though i had left, all of these friends of mine would still be there, still doing what they had always done, having the same sorts of parties and petty squabbles we had always had, and in that sense the thing i lost was more the thing i left.  but that really isn’t how this works. if i go back in four years i will know nobody except faculty, not that they don’t count for anything, but the ecosystem which i had personally inhabited will be entirely grown over, replaced, the landscape uncanny and new and not for me.

a friend who graduated yesterday observes this morning in her facebook status, as she prepares to move out:

i don’t know how to do this.

and my response, my thought based on my year turned out:

you know how sometimes you have a dream, really good or really bad or just plain vivid, and after you wake up it kind of stays with you? and you think about it a lot while drinking your coffee and eating breakfast but eventually the day goes on and other things happen, the thousand little mundane expectations and frustrations, and you forget about it for a day or two or a week or however long but then, suddenly, for no real reason, you remember it and it seems just as real to you at that moment as it did when you woke up from it and you experience a sensation of heartclenching injustice at the fact that something so real could so easily and quickly become unreal, and yet at the same time leaving you incapable of not feeling what you still know to be its reality? and you do this again and again as time goes on, forgetting and remembering the dream sometimes at random, or sometimes because you want to tell someone the story, or sometimes because simply and frankly it feels good to feel that way, to remember that even if things aren’t real now at one point they were, at one point every dream you ever had was the realest thing that ever happened to you?

it’s sort of like that. you do it like that.

2011: Arcs, the Apocalypse, and American Horror Story

My review of last year opened with a rather definitive statement.  There will be no such statement this year.

2011 was a different sort of year, a more difficult year, a year of complication and nuance and building and unraveling and expectation and perhaps — overall — fear.

When speaking of narrative a term that gets thrown around a lot is “arc.”  Where does a character start, and where do they end up?  The thing about life is that you’re always starting somewhere and ending up somewhere else, and then starting again.  You never really stop moving.  2011 was the year many arcs ended, and when many other began.

2011 was the year of learning what it means to occupy; to learn its dangers, and its signification.  American Horror Story is not just the name of a hit new series on FX, it’s also a buzzy phrase for our current political and economic clusterfuck.

But, then again, it’s also the name of a hit new series on FX.

I watched it recently, and American Horror Story is pretty good.  It did its homework on haunted house movies, and it’s got some visual flair.  It’s also one of the most sloppily written things I’ve seen in the past few years — there are, perhaps, no ghosts, just the mournful whisper of wind through the gaping and multitudinous plot holes.

But then there are also actually the ghosts.  The fact that the show is so poorly written means that, when you get right down to it, the character arcs make no sense.  Stories of haunting, as I’ve written on this blog before, often deal with that which has been denied or displaced or forgotten, the problems we’ve neglected to face but which still occupy, however nebulously, some space in our lives.  To save you from any spoilers, suffice it to say that the arc of American Horror Story does not attempt to navigate this hauntological cohabitation of the past and present.  What it does is cheat, in at least two ways.

One is the introduction of an apocalypse storyline — something the latest season of Dexter danced around as well — which is probably the most boring thing imaginable in a horror story for me.  The antichrist, the fruition of Revelation — so fucking what?  Supernatural or horror-inclined shows need to learn is that betting the whole damn farm only makes me think you’re not taking the game seriously.  The stakes are so high they’re meaningless.

The second way AHS cheats is a bit more subtle.  Though it wants us to think the apocalypse is a Bad Thing, total annihilation is in fact the only workable way out offered by the logic of the plot.  The only way our ghosts can be overcome — or at least, cohabitated with — is to be ghosts ourselves.  To force ourselves to belong to the past, or as the past seems to those who inhabit it, in a character’s words, “one long today.”

The apocalypse is the end of futurity.  If there is no future, there can be ghosts.  The ghosts become us, or we them.

Interesting, then, that the world is supposed to end in 2012.  I doubt this, of course, but I guess I could be proven wrong.

But for the time being, no matter what American Horror Story (the series or the situation) suggests, I rather think I’d like to continue soldiering on into the future, with my ghosts in tow.

In 2010 my life was working to a clear, definite point.  It was a time of transition but that transition’s nature felt solid.  The solidity fell to pieces in 2011, when many things happened.  These weren’t necessarily bad things; my graduation was one of them.  I am the first person in my family to obtain a four-year degree, a first-generation college student and, now, a first generation graduate student.  These are wonderful things.

And they are frightening things.  I am on my own now, further afield than any chick from the ancestral nest.  My friendships from undergrad, though they maintain in some ways thanks to modern technological convenience, have ended their arcs for now.  I need to build new relationships, I need to find new ways to occupy the world I’ve made for myself, and that others have made and will make for me.

It would be dishonest to not here mention the one arc still hanging from undergrad: the most frightening and the most wonderful thing of all about 2011.  She knows who she is, and to her I say thank you.  Thank you for staying in this story, even as it got messy.

For the rest of you, I wish you and all your ghosts a happy new year.

The Best Time I Ever Fell Down a Well

When I was about five years old I fell into a well.

This is not as wildly dramatic as it seems, as “well” in this case does not mean the classic visual trope of a moss-encrusted piece of masonry, a chthonian portal mortared together by our pioneer forefathers and slowly crumbling into dust ever since, waiting patiently in the middle of the forest or meadow to gobble up young boys such as I and/or your telepathic demon daughter who wants nothing more to be a ghost in the television.  No, what I mean by “well” here is a large metal tub, maybe about three feet in diameter and a foot high, with a grated bottom and a water spout rising over it to one side, said water spout being the actual “well” part of this device, tapped into the aquifer below and constantly pumping forth a heady stream of absolutely frigid water into the basin, where it drains through the grate and returns undrunk to the chill, stygian darkness.  Experts call this sort of thing an Artesian well.

So: there is this Artesian well on a campground-cum-park area near my hometown, as I just described it, pumping constantly all year and exposed to the elements, accumulating since time immemorial a patina of characteristic rust.  The pipe that spills the water into the basin has this nifty thing where, if you bend down over the well and put your palm over the open end, the water redirects to a smaller aperture at the top of the pipe, sending a vertical stream of water straight up into the air and into your mouth or probably your nose as the case may be.  However, at age five, I was slightly not tall enough to make this method of operation feasible, and so if I wanted to drink I had to cup my hands below the pipe’s larger opening, spooning the water into my mouth in this way.

Fun fact: I am picky about water.  Like, super picky.  I’m very sensitive to the way water tastes, and when I was younger my parents thought I was just being a brat and bullshitting them when I said water from this faucet or that faucet or this house or that city tasted bad.  But it was God’s honest truth, and it never made sense to me how some people can just, like, drink water from anywhere.  Anyway the point I want to make is that the water from this Artesian well tasted absolutely rad.

It was untreated, of course, which I think had something to do with it.  I’ve discovered that the harder water is, the more it is essentially some sort of sand/mineral suspension, the more I like it.  Up until the time I was about 12 and my parents divorced we lived in the country, in a house with its own well, and that water was harder than an AP Calculus exam.  Part of me has never forgiven my father’s eventual decision to buy a water softener, as that water is probably some of the best I’ve ever tasted.

The water from this Artesian well at the park area was a pretty close second, though.  We were at the park this particular day in late summer for what I believe was a family reunion, which was being held a bit of a ways away from the well in a largish shelter, where there were tables decked out with deviled eggs and potato salad and iced tea and a particular Midwestern delicacy called “hamloaf.”  I had aunts and uncles milling about, and some cousins, but I ended up in some strange generational gap on both sides of my family so there were no cousins precisely my age — they were all notably older or younger.  This meant I had pretty much no one to play with during functions like this, and I was particularly sensitive to when I was becoming a nuisance to adults, which translated into me hanging around on my own an inordinate amount of the time.

And so: this explains why I ventured out to the well on my own, at the tender age of five.  This was in fact no great journey, since the well was right next to the road and at most maybe a hundred yards from the shelter.  Because I 1) was bored, and 2) absolutely fucking love drinking good water, I decided at some point that what I really needed was to head out to the well and fuel up.  I’m five years old, so at the moment I’m making some educated guesswork about my exact thought process here, but it seems good enough.

Now what I remember is having no concept of the dimensions of a circle (though of course I did not know this at the time).  What I mean by this is that it did not occur to me how a point on one side of the circle is the furthest distance from a point on the exact opposite side of the same circle, which is to say, I completely failed to understand the concept of a diameter, esp. how it is the longest chord of a circle.  How this played out in real life was me standing exactly opposite the well’s spout, leaning over the rim of the basin with my hands cupped, grasping handful after handful of water.  Because I was the greatest possible distance from the object of my desires, I was leaning forward pretty damn far.

Too far, it turns out, as the relatively low rim of the basin and my relatively large forward bent plus the sudden weight and pressure of a powerful jet of water on my tiny five-year-old arms meant I tipped right the fuck over into the well.  My trajectory, then, consisted of more and more of me being pushed into the path of the water jetting from the spout, soaking me as I fell down into the basin, splashing all over my face and doing nothing to help my sudden, panicked, ultimately useless burst of adrenaline as I smacked right into the metal grating.

This is it, I thought.  I’ve fallen down a well.

As if it were an eventuality for every child.

I had been conditioned by years of television consumption and cultural osmosis to know that the only way to be saved from a well (any type of well!) was for a brilliant, golden-furred dog to witness the event and rush back to the old family homestead, where its worried barks would be correctly interpreted by one’s salt-of-the-earth family as an oddly specific yet ultimately effective and timely warning.  The immediate problem this posed was, of course, no dog had witnessed my accident — in fact, I did not own a dog.

I was doomed.

So I lay there, a torrent of water slamming into my back, too pressurized for me to actually stand up with the leverage afforded me, and my head throbbing where I’d bumped it against the side of the basin.  Like the greedy man who wishes for infinite riches and drowns in gold, that wonderful, mineral-infused H2O I had so loved and desired would now be my demise.

Except of course there was a grate in the bottom of the basin so the water was basically just running over me, back into the ground, and only getting into my mouth/nose because I was trying to shout for help instead of concentrating and trying to like, you know, move out from under the goddamn water.

Now, you will recall the depth of this basin is only, like, a foot, so there is no way it could have swallowed me entirely.  In fact, what any passersby would have seen (should they choose to look) was about the final third of a five year old boy, being mostly the legs, sticking up awkwardly into the air, Kermit the Frog adorned Velcro sneakers waving manically.

Luckily, a passerby did choose to look at this particular sight!  Some woman who happened to be driving by (remember, the well was pretty close to the road) saw me fall in and immediately slammed on the brakes, pulling over and dashing to my rescue.  From my perspective this meant that I had been in the  well for roughly half of my life (in reality: maybe 20 seconds) when suddenly something grabbed the back of my shirt, yanked me back through the gout of water, and into the land of living, non-doomed five-year-olds once more.

The woman, I remember rather distinctly, was for some reason wearing a lady’s business suit.

She slammed her palm into my back a few times to help me expel any water I may have swallowed (not much, really), and then helped me stagger back to the shelter, where some of my family members had noticed the spectacle and my older, more female relatives were positively flipping out at the way in which I had just brushed the edge of the mortal coil.  I readily admit my memory of this bit is even more hazy, being completely panicked and cold and wet as I was, but I distinctly remember thinking that the woman who had pulled me from the well was some family member I hadn’t met before, and I think I asked my grandma (as she wrapped me in a fluffy beach towel) if my savior was one of my aunts or something.

My father and I believe my grandfather shot some stern words my way about the incident, making me feel like I was somehow totally and irrationally guilty for what just transpired (in retrospect I think they were angry this stranger saw what looked suspiciously like reckless child endangerment) and that, on top of the whole having-almost-made-peace-with-my-own-death thing, did not put me in a particularly good mood for the rest of the day.

A few years ago, during high school, I was at the park again and saw the well’s basin now had a grate on top, as well  as on bottom, and I wondered if I was the sole purpose for that or, alternatively, how many kids through the years had ended up in my position.

The water was still really good, though.

if we stop teaching we’ll need someone to raise us from the dead

“What are you preparing to study?” asks the woman next to me on the bench.

English literature, I say.

It is approximately 82 degrees Fahrenheit and our bench, which does not have a protective awning, is placed squarely in the sun.  Three hours have passed since I first got off the bus at this stop, and I have walked in toto something like three and a half miles in a pair of sandals not made to live up to my usual brisk walking pace, so consequently my feet hurt like hell.  I have visited four bookstores and have $250 (15 pounds, ~6.8 kilograms) of books in my lap, this being no doubt the reason the woman asks me what I am studying.  My bus back to my apartment will arrive, by my estimates, in more or less 25 minutes.

“English, good,” says the woman.  “It’s a good thing to learn.  Good luck to you and bless you.”

She hesitates.  “God bless you, I mean,” she says after a moment of thought.  “His blessing has got a lot more weight to it than mine, I can say from experience.”  She laughs.

I laugh too, to be polite and thank her.  “I know it can be a hectic time right now,” she says.  “A big, new experience.”

I tell her that it is indeed, though I sort of have a head start.  I’m here for my MA/PhD, I already have my BA, but that was from a much smaller institution, and a very different institution, with only about 1,000 students combined compared to this place’s 40,000.

“Well, maybe you can teach them to concentrate,” the woman says, and laughs.

I laugh too.

“I know it’s supposed to be a place of learning,” she says, “but come dusk…”  She shakes her head.

I know what she means.  I’ve been here for only a week and multiple times now, and before 11 o’clock hits, I’ve seen the roaming herds of frat guys and sorority girls drunkenly jaywalk, like flocks of petulant birds in muscle shirts or miniskirts, respectively.

“Your degrees,” she says, “after the first one, when you get those does that mean you’re gonna teach the teachers?”

I say yes, because, well, I am sure some of my hypothetical future students will teach in their turn.

“Ah, that’s good.  I don’t have any degrees, but I have some experience with that area.”

The woman is maybe forty-something (she is 54, she will tell me later) and has on her lap a K-mart bag with some boxes in it and a Nalgene.  When I first sat down the woman was eating goldfish crackers from the K-mart bag, popping handfuls into her mouth.  She is thin without looking drawn in the way that some older people sometimes have, though her blonde hair is starting to look a bit gray in a certain light.  She is wearing a pair of sunglasses that sit close on her cheeks, the lenses so large and round that they obscure a third of her face and look a bit like goggles.

I am already mentally kicking myself when I ask her what it is exactly she does, because I dislike talking to strangers generally and dislike talkative strangers even more, plus what are the odds a random bus station conversation will not turn weird, especially given the God thing from earlier,  but there I go, I ask her, I ask her what it is exactly she does.

“I teach ministry,” she says, smiling that I’ve asked.  “I work with a group of believers here and do some street evangelizing.”

I nod and consider asking her if she’s associated with any particular church but don’t.  I also consider mentioning Quakerism, the theology with which for various reasons I tend to be most copacetic, but don’t.  Instead I ask her how long she’s been in town.

“A year,” she says.  “I was doing some wandering — I was in fact part of the homeless community for a while — and ended up in a tent.  Literally, in a tent!  Like Abraham!”

I know there is something of a housing crisis in the city, forcing many lower-income locals into nearby tent communities, and I am struck by the Old Testament parallel the woman has drawn.

“Of course, we’re moving on now,” the woman continues, “and the ministry has gotten stronger.  We were in our prayer circle back then,” I assume she means the tent city, “and we heard God telling us ‘boot camp.’  My minister-friend just looked at me and he says, ‘Boot camp.'”

The chain of association here is beyond me, though I guess the idea is that boot camp whips you into shape for deployment whether you like it or not, and the woman and her prayer circle were being told by God to stop feeling sorry for themselves in a tent community and move on with their lives, an act which apparently consists of spiritual deployment into the Gomorrha of a Big Ten University town.  Whatever the case, combinations of military and religious terminology make me uneasy (cf. Quakerism, above), so I just nod and cross my arms over my books.

“And you know,” she is saying, “it took some humbling when I heard that.  I had to get rid of my pride.  My minister-friend asked me, if you were ministering in a jungle somewhere where they hadn’t heard of Christ, would you try to change their culture, or be Christ-like in their presence?”

Though I’m still not really following the chain of association, I think this is a pretty good theological sticking point and I tell her so.

She nods.  “That shut me right up,” she says.  “Now I think that when we do minister, we have a lot more behind us than we wouldn’t have without that experience.”

Yeah, I agree, it seems to me she and her friends would have a strong foundation from which to work.  They know what it’s like to be in tough spots, unlike some ministers.

She nods again.  “I may not have any letters next to my name, but I did go to college, and I’m 54 years old, and I got experience.”  She offers me her hand and tells me her name is Tracey.

I shake her hand and tell her my name is Michael.

Something flits across her face and she says, “Of course it’s Michael,” which is a pretty weird thing to say and I mentally kick myself some more while I wait to see where this is going.  “You know what that name means, right?”

I say I don’t remember the Hebrew meaning, but I know that Biblically Michael is an Archangel, the general of Heaven’s army.  (I know this because I read Milton.)

“And what it originally means,” she says, “is ‘Who is like God?'”

I know this is correct, because I remember the fact as she says it, as sometimes we remember facts.  I think it’s a rhetorical question, because the correct answer is that there is no one like God.

She says, “I know that because it’s also the name of the father of my child.”

Oh Lord, I think.

“We looked it up once.”

This is the end of this particular tangent, apparently, as she goes onto how names are very interesting, very meaningful.  I sort of wish I knew what ‘Tracey’ meant so I could say something about it, or maybe I could ask her because she probably knows, but I don’t.

The topic of names steers her toward the topic of her ministry again.  She works in prisons, leading classes with names like “Emotional Healing” and “Positive Attitudes.”  She makes it a point to memorize each prisoner’s name — and with God’s help she does it within the first six weeks — because names are important.  A lot of those people aren’t used to being called by their names, just their numbers by the guards and their doctors, and sometimes by their doctors’ diagnoses, which trap them into cycles of thinking about themselves in certain ways, ways which limit how they can act and feel.  And part of her job as a teacher, she says, is to help break those cycles, to show those people that they can be loved, to help them learn how to be loved.  If you can’t be loved then you’ll never love anyone yourself.

I look in my lap at a copy of The Duchess of Malfi, which is a play where a corrupt cardinal confesses his sins to his mistresses and then murders her by persuading her to kiss the poisoned cover of a Bible.

I tell her what’s she saying is very true.  I’m angry at myself a little because I know that despite the sappy rhetoric what she is saying is true, I’m angry at myself for thinking that and at the same time thinking it’s absolutely cheesy, and I’m angry at this woman for talking to me, and I’m angry at myself for talking back, and I’m angry I have this impulse to immediately start forming counterarguments, I’m angry that I have to squash a desire to say, Well, yes, but aren’t there some people who just won’t learn to love?

“It’s all about attitude,” says Tracey.  “You have to keep your attitude positive, because — and I know this — in a lot of situations, all you really can control is your attitude about things.”

I agree again, this time more enthusiastically because it really is true, and I don’t think this is a cheesy thing to believe or say, even though I’m aware that other people probably do.  It’s a shame, a real shame, I say, that there are so many people who never learn that, who aren’t taught that.

“You’re right,” Tracey says.  “And a problem with a lot of people who haven’t learned that early, is later on they won’t learn it.  They’ll think they already learned everything.”

I think, what if this were a Flannery O’Connor story?  The street evangelical and the modern malaised intellectual at a bus top on a hot day.  If this were a Flannery O’Connor story Tracey would be blind behind those sunglasses, or she’d have a club foot.  If this were a Flannery O’Connor story I would probably die at the end.

“I have a saying,” Tracey tells me: “If we stop teaching we’ll need someone to raise us from the dead.”

This doesn’t make sense to me at first blush.

“Something I’ve learned, while teaching,” she says, “is that if you’re teaching, you’re also learning, and if you’re learning more, you should understand each time you learn more, how much more you haven’t learned.”

Again she’s saying things I agree with, which makes me happy but then also makes me uneasy, because it makes me wonder how much of what I believe is basically bromides for street evangelists, and then I am angry at myself for wondering for even the tiniest second that something being a bromide, or something being believed by both myself and a street evangelist, makes it inherently lesser.

I tell her that’s she speaking a lot of sense, and I see my bus is coming, so I tell her good luck with the ministry.  And then I think Oh hell why not, and I tell her God bless, too.

She takes the same bus as I do, but we have different stops and sit pretty far apart, so by the time I get off she’s already having an involved conversation with the unsteady old man who sat beside her.

I think about how when I first sat down she was eating little goldfish crackers, and the little fish connected with the fact she’s a Christian minister would be symbolically significant in a short story, but I don’t know how to make it work without it seeming silly.

The pains of celebrity

Last night my friends and I were just walking out of Wal-mart when we were greeted with an uproarious cry of “DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE” from some girl a couple yards away.  She was walking with another girl and some guy, and I just assumed they were having some conversation among themselves and she was screaming about that.  But as we walk to the van she keeps shouting and it turns out she is, in fact, talking to us.  My friend Abner wheels around, seeing an opportunity for… something.  Anyway, he asks the girl what she wants and she replies that she wants to know if we are Death Cab for Cutie, and if we are, would we sign something for her — specifically her breasts.  Abner says, Sure of course we are Death Cab for Cutie and we will do this thing.

So while the dude hangs out near the front doors of the Wal-mart the two girls come running toward us, completely excited, me and my friends who aren’t Abner try to figure out exactly what direction our lives are taking at the moment.  The girls eventually figure out that we are not Death Cab, but claim it was an honest mistake because “you [referring to me, your humblr narrator] look just like Ben Gibbard.”  I laugh at this, but the girls don’t seem to notice.  Let me describe these girls so I can distinguish them as the story goes on:

The shouty one is blonde, has glasses.  The other girl is brunette and doesn’t seem to be enjoying the events quite as much.  When I say I don’t think I look like Gibbard, the blonde says, “But he has a really good voice.”  Presumably, she means Gibbard?

I reply, “I don’t,” to which she insists I sing her a song anyway.

Okay so.

I consider doing a few lines from Running with the Devil, but the brunette interrupts us by saying that my “coat looks depressing, like you got it from a funeral.  Did someone in your family die?”  [To explain, I wear a black wool blend overcoat in the colder months, which I guess looks kind of funereal?]  I respond, yes, people in my family have died many times.  I in fact got the coat off a dead guy.

My gameplan is  to just be weird and hostileto get these people freaked out and gone, but unfortunately they’re already too off-balance to really pick up on that.  The blonde cuts in now, asking that, even if we are not Death Cab, would I please sign her boobs.  Not even the whole name, she says, just D-C-F-C would suffice.

Without confirmation from me, they start shouting to their dude friend, who has been hanging out by the doors this whole time: “Trevor!  Trevor!!  TREVOR WE NEED A MARKER!”  Trevor trundles over looking as if he might be genuinely sober and embarrassed.  “Trevor,” the blonde says, “this guy looks like Ben Gibbard and he needs to sign my boobs, do you have a marker?”

Trevor doesn’t have a marker. “But I have this,” he says to me, and pulls a Bic lighter out of his pocket.  “You could brand her.”  And my hopes of him being sober, or rational, or whatever, go flying out the window.

“I feel like we’re being punk’d,” says my friend Travis, and I reply, “But I’m not even an actual celebrity.”  The blonde is still harping on how much she wants this goddamn autograph, on her breast, from me, I guy that is not the celebrity she apparently mistook me for.  I reply that I won’t do it, taking a page from Trevor’s book she says I could brand her, I say no, I am not going to permanently scar a woman in a Wal-mart parking lot.

“Oh,” she says nonchalantly, “I already have scars.”

Okay.  “We’re all scarred, in our own way,” again hoping if I can remain stoic I can divert their attention.  The blonde, though, comes right over to me and pulls up her shirt sleeves to show me the many scars and bruises crisscrossing her wrists.  Then she opens her shirt, and without removing her bra traces a few scars up her abdomen for the benefit of me and my friends.

She ends with talking about the scars on her legs, and says she’d show them to us but wouldn’t want to pull down her pants in public.  Of course.  But I refuse to sign/brand her, and tell them all good evening as we try to get back to our van.  We get fifteen feet before she comes back: “Wait!  I at least need a hug!”

I don’t want to hug anyone because right now, but me, being Ben Gibbard, am the object of most of her attention.  She attempts an embrace but I suggest we go for a handshake instead; she says we have to do her “special high five,” which I go along with: high five, followed by fistbump, and then the girl screams, “NOW TO MAKE IT DIRTY” and holds up her hand with the index finger and thumb in a circle.

I am genuinely confused at this point and it takes me about five seconds to realize I am supposed to thread my finger through her fingers in a crude imitation of sexual intercourse, but I decide to run with my confusion, because I am not going to fucking do that.  “Huh?” I ask.

“Make it dirty!”

“I don’t understand!”

“Come on, like, you know, make it dirty!!”

“I’m afraid… I don’t understand.”

At this point the brown-haired girl, who’s been pretty chill so far by comparison, gets tired of me being so dense so she stomp over.  “Jeez, it’s like, don’t you get it’s like” — she completes the gesture with her friend, sticking her index finger into the circle.

And I say, completely amazed, “Well what the hell does that mean?!”

The brunette turns to me, huffing with frustration, and shouts, “It’s like A DICK and A PENIS!”

That fucking does it, I can’t hold it back anymore and start laughing, and the blonde berates her friend for this simple and redundant mistake in anatomy.

My friend, by the way, left me to go stand by the van, not bothering to, like, help me or anything.  Christ, Abner was such an asshole.  Anyway, they’re all standing over there basically rolling on the ground and giggling, and whatever I’ve done seems to have broken a spell because now the two girls are walking back over to Trevor.  I think I’m finally free, but the brunette says over her shoulder as she leaves: “I’m sorry about your family member who died.”  I tell them all to have a good evening.

So finally we’ve gotten back to the van, but of all people Trevor has one last thing to say:

“Hey!” he shouts at my friend Travis. “You know you look like Demetri Martin?”