Here is a conversation I (Mark) just had with Anna:

It’s pretty much the best short story I could ever write.

This is a monologue I wrote about what I do/did at night.  Pretty regularly.  It’s in reference to the “Middle of the Night” episode of This American Life.  It’s pretty self-involved… as most monologues should be.

Certain names have been changed.  Hope no one is offended.

The night begins with coffee.  It is a ritual that I started years ago, back in undergrad.  Back then, we hardly slept.  About one hour after dinner, when I finally worked up the strength to be productive, there was a ritual that surrounded myself and the coffee pot in my room:

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I promise.  I’m working on writing a lot more.  And on the topic that I previously proposed.  I’m actually working on both a “Bait & Switch” story and a “What We Do At Night” piece right now.  But until those are finished…

This is a very, very short character sketch I wrote a little while back:

There is a child being held by her mother at the Bedford Avenue subway stop.  She is sucking her thumb and staring staring staring at a man who is playing the violin and singing loudly.  It is the saddest song she has ever heard and it drips out like the cries that the child knows exist.  She understands that there is pain.  She has fallen and scraped knees and watched as her mother’s hand shakes while it pays bills.  She knows that this pain is in the world, but she has not learned about it yet.  The girl somehow understands.  She knows that she is staring into her future, through black locks falling in front of her eyes, past her mother’s ears, into her future.  She has been programmed to know that this is the eventual end of all things.  But she cannot fathom it yet.  All of this sorrow, somehow, is a part of the life that she knows she will be forced to breath through.  She begins to cry.  Then her mother bounces her and and whispers a frail, “Shhhh.”  For the first time, the child stops immediately.  The man finishes his song.  The train arrives.

A while back, I was given the challenge of writing a short piece about “air.”  That was the only guideline.  I wrote about all the things that air does, who it goes in and out of, what it effects in our day and age, how it’s changed.

Long story short, I made a case that the air is really heavy these days.  That it’s hard to breathe because of all that is going on and every little thing that every single person does is right in front of us.  Sometimes it can even hurt people.

But sometimes it brings them together, for better or worse.  I made an audio recording of it, with a little experimental work backing it. Continue Reading »

There is a hole in Midtown Manhattan.  Not Central Park.  That is an honest park.  Between 40th and 42nd Streets, and between 5th and 6th Avenues, there is a hole called Bryant Park and it is the strangest place I’ve experienced in this town so far.  It’s a place that changes just as fast as all the ghosts that pass over it, underneath it (it’s a hub for five subway lines), walk through the always-lush grass everyday in the summer.

Six months ago I laid in that grass with a pair of jean shorts on and sunglasses, surrounded by friends.  We drank wine straight from the bottle and joined nearly three-thousand other people in cheering as Paul Newman was projected on a giant screen at the West end of the park.  We all sighed together as his character, Hud, mourned the brutal murder of his herd of cows, the only family he had.  We all strangely moved together.

Right now, it’s completely different.  There are construction crews carting off sections of an ice rink that lived atop the hole in Manhattan all winter.  Unlike after the movie, I won’t be riding a bike through the city back to my apartment.  Like the ferocious building and changing of the winter wonderland due to uncontrollable weather change and the city’s ability to sell something everywhere, a doctor recently cut into my knee in three places and pulled a wayward meniscus from where it had been lodged in the joint.  A limp, slightly slower than normal walking pace is the maximum speed that I can move at.  These days, I am forced to walk alone.

But there are times, in this exact spot, when everything is perfectly all right.  Every once in a while, usually with a stiff autumn wind at your back, you’ll find yourself walking towards a friend you’d given up on.  She’s sitting at a table and she sees you from one-hundred feet away, her gaze never breaks from you, nor does her smile.  She hands you a coffee as you sit down, she’s been waiting.  Nothing remarkable has happened, just a normal day that she’s wanted to share with you.  And that’s when you realize that you can’t keep it all straight.  The constant crowds, the maze-like building interiors, the absurd address system that has you crossing the same block three times before finding your destination, the advertising bombardment.  All the changes always happening faster and fasterfaster.

And that’s when she’ll ask how your day was.  You’ll realize that here, now, in this park, with these ghosts moving around you, this is really okay.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I thought of France while I was there for a while now.  Sometimes I get really angry at my behavior over there. Sometimes I just want to go back.  It’s one of those cliches that is a cliche because it’s SO true.  That town is the most beautiful and most perfect place to disappear in.

But anyway, here’s a draft of a story I wrote about being there.  Comments are welcome.

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A long time ago, Ms. 12×2 asked me to try writing a story. She outlined that I should not think of the story ahead of time, the story should all be written at once, and I can only begin writing when a song (of my choosing) begins and I must stop when the song ends. I finally did it. You can find the story below, along with a link to download the song (right-click/Ctrl+click, then Save As).

Sunset Rubdown, Us Ones In Between, 4 minutes, 26 seconds

He doesn’t look anywhere but directly in front of him. Wind whips past, over his sunglasses, as he pushes harder down on the pedals and a skyline rises from the clouds ahead. He is surrounded on all sides by a red cage, barring him from drifting into traffic, shoving him into the paths of the slower-moving overweight women with their children.

He can still taste it in his mouth, the two-day-old coffee he reheated. He’d sipped the last three mouthfuls all at once while looking in the mirror and thought to himself, “god, this feels like myself.”

He can’t understand the buildings that he’s descending into. It’s okay. The people next to him don’t understand it either. Their eyes connect, but it is only to avoid slamming into each other at high velocities, only to avoid broken bones and headaches. He passes on the inside lanes and the outsides, shoving his knuckles into the walls of taxi cab windows. He feels no pain against his fingers, the combination of anger and pain creates a warm pool of water that his hand dips within. Inside of the cabs, he pats the riders on the back, telling them it’s not their fault. Caressing their jaws. Telling them that no one here knows anyone. That that’s okay. That if they all fall down today, at least they’ll be laying on top of each other, hair intertwined, coffee-drenched breaths pungent, understanding of, if nothing else, each other’s yearning for somewhere else.

A stab at being kind of funny for once? Let me know what you think.

Billy Was Right.

I’ve put a lot of things in my mouth for girls.  No, I’m serious.  The amount of things I’ve thought were horrendously revolting at the time of my stuffing them in so as to impress or a female is insurmountable.  There was a point in my life when I held the firm belief that the true way to any girl’s heart was to tell Billy I wasn’t a “sissy.”  To tell him that he was a “butt head.”  To take his dare and eat a worm in front of Jenny on the swing set.  Billy was right.  I was a sissy.  The vomit on Jenny’s shoes proved it.

These days, I’m one wet-wipe away from germ-o-phobe status and I possess the same taste palate as I did back on the swing set.  I get by on pasta, sandwiches, and anything I can purchase at the local café where they know better than to ask me if I want any veggies on my ham and cheese sandwich.  They even bypass the “soup or salad” question by handing over the damn minestrone without argument. Continue Reading »

It took asking, begging, even bribing John with promises of baked goods to convince him to drive us the thirty miles to the lake.

All day we watched the sand rise between our toes and the boats float out to the horizon. Jenny and I, we’d brought ham and cheese sandwiches, ate while sitting on top of a crate that probably used to be a place for fish before they were carted off to market. It still smelled like fish. It smelled like fish, but not in a way that would make you wrinkle your nose up. Nothing was rotting, it smelled like the work that was done around the fish. The fishermen’s muscles ticking their living off pound by pound as they pulled life from the sea to the land. We lathered each other in sunblock more to complete the aroma than for protection from the clouded sun.

After collecting rocks that reminded us of our dreams, we tossed them into the water, watching them skip, skim, and then sink down below the opaque surface of Lake Michigan. There was no talk of the trouble we’d be getting in for leaving home for the day.

When the clouds shifted and let the sun through, we smiled for John’s camera. Jenny’s hand touched my elbow, I heard the camera click and, right then, I knew I’d be fine.

The following piece is actually intended to be spoken out loud, not read. I encourage you to go in a dark room, your closet, the top of your roof, a dim library, wherever, and read it out loud in the fastest, most frenetic, most childish voice possible. Try to sound innocent. Perhaps, if things treat me well enough tonight, I’ll record myself reading it… an endeavor that will definitely provide my nasally whine of a voice a few minutes to shine.

I walked into the library trying to make it look like I was walking in on any of the other days that I walked into that library because I went there all the time. There’s the desk over there where the pretty librarian sets her books down and slams the rubber on the cover hard and fast and moves on to the next book. She looked me up and down and waggled her eyes at me. I waved “hi” to her like on any other day.
She waved back at me and when I got past her I saw one of her hands pick up the telephone and dial the first three numbers of a phone number out of the corner of my eye. Her glasses slid off of her nose and she pushed them back up so that they would match with those funny dents they had left. I could hear her speaking quickly but had no time to make out the words because I had to get to my table and my book.
The shelves of books were piled higher than my head, sometimes looking like they were going to fall over, like shelves were on shelves, like the ones that my dad had made in the garage. I had never seen the shelves of books fall on anyone but thought they might because I can remember seeing the tool shelves fall on the car when I was reaching for the wrench to hit the snake. Continue Reading »