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Still plugging away…


8. A photo of your favorite band/musician. Soul Coughing? Sure, why not?

Not as psyched about this particular part of the photo-a-day meme. Required me to choose a “favorite” band. Then it required me to find a photo of them. I haven’t taken photos of any bands. Anyway. Here is a picture of Soul Coughing.

Very nearly gave up on this thing today. Just felt like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Hey, been there before, right? Just not in love with anything that I’m writing. But, this evening, a well-timed pep talk from the NaNoWriMo people convinced me to just keep going. So, thanks NaNoWriMo people…. I guess. Anyhow — word count: 18,167. Excerpt: some silly stuff I wrote yesterday.

Jimmy kept the one room shed dark most of the time, but when I finally made my way inside I found it to be brightly lit by a dozen floating fish-shaped lamps. Paul was standing in the middle of the room gazing up at the lights with a look of child-like wonder on his face. I joined him. Each of the lights was cycling through a set of soft pastels, and though they each put out an incredible amount of light, more than one would expect, it still maintained a gentle quality, not harsh or glaring; just…bright. Jimmy was seated at a long table, tinkering with a lamp that had somehow malfunctioned.
“Jimmy,” Paul breathed, “these are amazing.”
“Yeah, Jimmy,” I agreed,  “these are awesome. When did you come up with these? I thought you were snowed under with your holiday things.”
“What? Oh. These are just something I’ve been messing with in my free time.”
“In your free time?” I asked, disbelieving. “…Ok.”
“Anyway, I wish you’d tell Trammel how much you like them,” Jimmy said, looking up from his work. “He thinks they won’t sell.”
“He thinks they won’t sell?” Paul exclaimed. “They’re floating fucking fish lamps.”
“Yeah. He says that fish shaped stuff is done. Last year.”
“Does he know that they float? Like. In the air?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Um, Jimmy?” Paul asked.
“Yeah?”
“How do they do that? Float, I mean.”
“Oh, it’s really quite simple. The excess thermal energy generated by the light in the lamp is used to heat a small capsule of gaseous iron maganate, which, when it expands creates a negative gravitational index.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Yeah. A chemist friend of mine who works for NASA hooked me up with it. Here, check it out.”
As he spoke, he gave the tail of the lamp he was working on a quarter turn. It lit up purple, cycled through green and red. He held the fish in his open palms and shortly, it floated out of his hands. He gave it a gentle push and it joined the rest of the lamps just slightly over our heads. The lamps gave the room a peaceful, ethereal feel. I wanted half a dozen of them for my apartment.
“How much would these retail for?” I asked.
“That’s the thing. Right now we’d have to sell one for $13.99. I’m trying to get the cost down to two for $10. You know how Trammel feels about the Threshold.”
The Threshold was the name Trammel had given for what he felt was the price point that an average consumer would buy something. It varied from product to product, but there were some general rules. For something like this, which fell firmly into the novelty lighting category, Trammel stood firm at two for 10. When something had been dumbed down, cheapened or otherwise fucked with in order to fit in Trammel’s pricing structure, we said that it had been “Thresholed.”
“You mean these things are only $14? And the only reason Trammel doesn’t want to produce them is because they’re fish? And you might not be able to make them two for ten?”
“Better products have been axed for worse reasons, Arthur,” Jimmy said solemnly. “Is it lunch time?”
“Yes, it is,” Paul said. “I’m starving. Let’s go.”

Love!

7. A photo of someone you love. Phil Martin & me at Morseland 11/2/10

Another tough one to figure — what with photos of my best friend(s) and family coming up. Certainly Phil falls into those categories as well, and people in those categories crossover too. But, hell, decisions had to be made, so Phil makes it in. How could I not love him? Driving out to Golf Mill on Saturday mornings, through the gray of Chicago winter and the morass of teenaged minds; chopping wood; getting lemonade on the nose. So much history.

Realized I haven’t updated the word count here lately: 15,517.

Today’s excerpt is based on an actual conversation about an actual website:

Shutting the door of the cutting room behind me, I found myself mere feet away from the cubicle. A trip that should take five minutes at the most, it had taken me nearly a half hour to traverse the building. I couldn’t believe I’d finally made it. I rested for a moment against the cubicle wall, listening to the bickering coming from within.
Paul’s voice: “It’s fake, Therese. It’s not real.”
Therese: “How do you know that?”
“Because, Therese, I looked it up on Snopes.com and it said it’s not real. Also, because I saw the same email 2 years ago. Also, because nobody would actually publish a real how-to website on how to make a bonsai kitten.”
I could hear Kate say something, but because she spoke so quietly and in a monotone, I couldn’t make out any of the words. I was surprised that either Paul or Therese could understand her, but apparently Paul heard her perfectly because he replied directly. “Kate, there is no valid reason to censor the website. Anybody who is stupid enough to believe the website is real — no offense to either of you, of course — has bigger issues. And anybody who’s insane enough to try it probably already has a freezer full of body parts.”
“Ewww, gross,” said Therese.
“I’m just saying,” Paul replied.
Therese scoffed. “‘Just saying,’” she mimicked. “You’re just saying that you think it’s okay for someone to post instructions on how to abuse kittens on the web.”
“There are much worse things out there, Therese! And we shouldn’t be looking to censor the web, especially not a site that’s so obviously a joke! The site’s owner can’t and shouldn’t be held responsible for what people do after they look at the site. You can’t blame Ozzy Osbourne for suicides, Dexter for murders, or Grand Theft Auto for carjackers. If people are fucked up, they’re fucked up. End of story.”
“You sound just like Arthur,” Therese said. I smiled. It was true. He did.
“Well, there are worse people to sound like,” Paul said. “Where is that dude, anyway?”
If I’d needed a cue, that was it. I love making a good entrance. I stepped around the corner. “Have no fear, my friends. I’m right here.”
“Heeey, Art,” Paul said. We high-fived.
Therese and Kate, who had both been facing the center of the cubicle, turned their chairs back towards their desks.
“Ladies,” I said, walking to my desk. “Nice to see you again.”
I fell into my chair, exhausted from running the obstacle course that was the Cola Industries building.
“Hey Art,” Paul said, “don’t get too comfortable.”
I sighed. I just wanted to sit at my desk, maybe waste some bandwidth out of spite. “Why not?” I asked.
“Time for lunch.”
Immediately rejuvenated, I jumped from my chair. “Cool. Let’s grab Jimmy.”

A Wig and a Coke

6. A photo that makes you laugh. Dave Dubois @ Ripon College, ~1995(?)

This photo is hilarious because that’s not his real hair. It’s not his hat either.

Good timing on this part of the meme because yesterday I was given the phrase “Where are we going to find a Canadian at this time of night?” which is just about the funniest phrase ever and the perfect caption for every New Yorker cartoon. Anyhow:

Covered in scratches, I made it to the patio door just as Greta and Helene, two women who worked on the second floor and whose job descriptions I had never quite figured out — I had thought that maybe Greta worked in HR and perhaps Helene did something with accounting but the heads of those respective departments had each told me that wasn’t true — were coming out for their 11:30 smoke break.
Greta was finishing a joke: “…and then the priest says to the violin maker, ‘Where are we going to find a Canadian at this time of night?’” she said.
“I don’t get it,” Helene said.
“Neither do I,” Greta admitted. “I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Also, for some reason today I decided to write as if Coca-Cola was sponsoring this novel. Keep in mind that “Cola Industries” is the name of the entirely fictitious company where the narrator is employed and has nothing to do with Coke or Coca-Cola or beverages of any sort:

I stepped through the doorway into the break room and stopped dead in my tracks. The room was filled with the older folks, and they all stopped mid-sentence, mid-chew, mid-swallow to look up at my arrival. I waved, smiled, pointed at the soda machine.

“Just, uh, just here to get a Coke,” I said. “You guys know how much I love Coke.”
The room nodded as one. The break room contained the only aluminum recycling container in the building, and since it was upstairs from the cube, that meant expending a certain amount of effort in order to be a responsible citizen of planet Earth, not that I really gave a shit about that, but it was good to keep up appearances. Thus, my desk was often home to a stack of empty Coke cans. People mistook my apathy and lethargy for an extreme sugar and caffeine addiction and just loved to comment on it. I’m not hypoglycemic, I’m just lazy.
I made my way to the Coke machine, fed it a dollar bill, retrieved the can and my change and turned to leave. At the door, I found myself face to face with Cheryl, the head of IT. I said hello and tried to get around her, but she blocked my way
“Arthur Traum,” she said, looking as sour as usual. “Just the person I wanted to see.”
My luck had run out. I knew it had been too good to be true. I had almost made it to the relatively safe haven of my desk but I had pressed my luck, stopping for the Coke. Curse my love of its distinct cola taste, the sweet bite of the bubbles.
“What’s up, Cheryl?” I asked, opening the can. I even loved the sound of the spliting metal, the escaping carbon dioxide. It was like music.
“It’s about that web site of yours,” she said, the words dripping like flat Coke from her mouth.
“The web site of mine?” I knew she was referring to the Cola Industries intranet site. Aside from the sales staff I was the only one who made use of it, but I had never claimed it and certainly felt no ownership over it. The site had been built by a third party web development firm — one that, coincidentally, I had applied to upon my arrival in Jersey. I mentioned this to their project manager after a strategy meeting. He had given me a thin lipped smile and said that he “vaguely recalled” seeing my resume. So much for that. “What about it?”
“Your photo uploads are tipping us over our bandwidth allotment. You’re going to have to reduce the file size. Or something.” She smiled, saccharine sweet and just as cancerous.
“You mean to tell me that uploading a couple hundred 30k files each month is putting that big a dent in our bandwidth allowance? That’s just not possible.”
Her smile vanished, evaporating like Diet Coke on a hot summer day, leaving behind a sticky residue of disdain.

Sadness.

5. A photo that makes you sad. Mom & me, Mt. Hood, Oregon, August 9, 2008

Today’s photo assignment was a little more difficult than the rest. I looked through a bunch of pictures, and yeah, there are photos that make me sad, or remember sad times — pictures of old girlfriends; pictures of me eating ice cream cake alone on my 8th birthday; pictures of me about to make huge mistakes (e.g. moving to New Jersey.) This picture actually doesn’t make me particularly sad, but it does bring up a lot of thoughts and such. At the risk of becoming extremely maudlin: This is, more or less, one of the last times I saw my mother. Gregory was out in Oregon to drive a road rally with our stepfather, Frank, and I flew out to Washington then drove down with Mom to meet them all and hang out. We had a great time. I almost didn’t go, if it weren’t for an intense kick in the ass courtesy of my brother (thank you, G) and I learned a lesson about making an effort. Anyway. That’s really the part that makes me sad — these pictures are a testament to my own self-destructive disinterest. Know too much now? I apologize.

But, while we’re on the subject — I was looking through last year’s NaNoWriMo report card (an excel spreadsheet that does a lot of great calculations as you plugin your daily word totals) and was reading through the comments I’d written. It’s standard fare for the first couple weeks: “I can’t do this”, “I really can’t do this”, “Oh wait, I can do this.” Until November 19th, a day on which I wrote a mere 194 words. The only comment is “fuck the planet.” After that, no more comments. No more filling in optional fields. Remember when I said that bad things always happen in November? Watch this space….

Alright. So, yesterday I wrote about a drive from my apartment to work, and today, looking through pictures, I found a photo of the particular road I was writing about. I thought they’d make a good photo/excerpt combo. Oh, also, Chocolate Peanut Butter Bugles exist.

This is Scott's Corner/Broadway road in Cranbury, NJ.

Two miles further, the road made a slow curve to the east, past more fields and then into a heavily wooded area, the street cutting a path through trees that towered overhead. During the summer the thick foliage would completely block out the sun but the trees were just now starting to sprout their leaves and so the sun peeked through casting shadows across the road, causing a strobe effect that could be disorienting and distracting. I loved it, looked forward to it each day. It felt like driving through some otherworldly place, another adventure for me. Today, however, the thought of driving through what was undoubtedly a cicada-covered hell gave me pause. I slowed down, hesitated, then looked again at the dashboard clock. 11:03. I was screwed. Doomed to endure another lecture from Sharon. I hadn’t even called. I hit the accelerator, felt the engine take hold, the wheels dig into the road, the car lurch forward and I zipped in amongst the trees.
The world was immediately different. The eerie silence that I’d experienced outside of the forest was gone, replaced instantly by a high pitched droning noise that was strangely similar to a phaser from the original Star Trek series. The car shuddered as if buffeted by intense wind, it felt as if I had slowed, like I was driving through thick tar. The noise was unnerving and was so loud that it caused me to instinctively raise my hands to my ears to try to block it out. The car swerved sharply to the left and I realized what a bad idea this was to while driving 70 miles per hour in a car with shoddy wheel alignment. I dropped my right hand back to the wheel, jerked the car back to the road and drove on. With my left hand, I groped for the lever to raise the window. Even with the window closed, the sound from the trees was still nearly deafening.
I gritted my teeth, clenched the wheel with both hands, willing the car to stay on the road which wound its way through the trees. I risked glances to the left and right. The forest was alive, the trees were moving. They passed in a blur, once brown trunks now black, brown, spots of white, dotted with the fiery red of the bugs’ eyes. I drove through the living nightmare, now resisting the urge to look at anything except the road, but the road itself was coming to life. Here and there, the pavement was cracked and cicadas streamed upward and out, the crunch of dead insects under my wheels now faintly audible behind the constant hum, my car tires committing a mini-genocide that gave me some small amount of pleasure until I realized that for every cicada I drove over there were ten more live ones behind it and hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands more in the trees.
And then it was over. The stretch of road passing through the forest was only about a mile long, and though it had seemed while I was in it that time had slowed to a crawl, that I would never make it through, the laws of physics hadn’t been completely suspended. It had taken me less than a minute to make it. My car burst from the trees, into unfiltered sunlight and complete silence.

Cicadapocalypse

4. A photo of the last place you went on holiday. Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, CA.

The last place I went on holiday was just a few weeks ago when I went to San Francisco for Halsted‘s wedding (which was wonderful). This is one of the few photos I took while I was there and just one of two or three that aren’t completely blurry messes. Also: This is where chocolate comes from.

The first night of the cicada invasion. The bugs emerged and started crawling up the side of the house.

So, I’ve started down the zombie path, which led to me adding some of my creepiest memories of the cicada invasion which occurred while I lived in New Jersey. Brood X, a 17 year cicada popped out and made for some surreal living. And I’m thinking, what better cause for zombieism than a bunch of terrifying bugs? Or perhaps it’s just a good backdrop for them? Or maybe they’re the zombies themselves? The thought of a body bursting open, filled with cicadas…. Ok, I’m making myself ill now. Let’s just move onto an excerpt:

Towards the end of the worst of the cicadas, this one was wedged into the hood of my car.

But now, here it was again. A cicada invasion was once again the talk of the town. It was all anybody could think of. The conversation rankled me; nobody would listen to reason.
“I’ve been through this before,” I said, for what must have been the hundredth time that month. “It’s all a bunch of hype and fear mongering. They need to keep us scared of something, so they’re latching onto this.”
“Who’s they?” Therese asked.
“You know,” I said. “They. Them.”
“Who?”
I sighed, looked to Paul for help. He just shrugged. As my best friend in the bunch, the only civilized person amongst the savages of central Jersey, I often needed backup from him. He was usually quick to come to my aid, but sometimes he seemed to derive a sort of sick pleasure from watching me twist in the wind.
I turned back to Therese. “They are the government, the news media, the entertainment industry. Gun control nuts. Red state extremists. Fucking…fucking McDonald’s and PepsiCo.” I was on a roll, reaching for straws perhaps, but on a roll nonetheless. Once I got started it was hard to stop. “Think of everyone that benefits when we’re kept afraid. Docile. Timid and meek inside our houses, too scared to come outside, much less to question a government edict that makes it legal to drag citizens out of bed in the middle of the night to question them without counsel present, to hold them indefinitely without charges, to make people disappear, erase them from the public record as if they had never existed. Think about how quickly emergency acts get passed. And look at all the revenue being generated. All the advertising dollars. All the protective gear being sold.”
Sharon took her eyes off of Paul for a second and cast a dark but amused gaze in my direction. “Do you really believe all the things that you say?” she asked.
“Of course I do,” I said. “If you can’t recognize a vast, global governmental conspiracy underwritten by Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay and executed by CNN and Comedy Central when the proof is right there before your very eyes, then can you claim to be paying attention to what’s going on around you?”
Sharon rolled her eyes at me — something she did with frightening regularity. It was okay: I was used to it, and tended to return the gesture with similar frequency.

Zompocalypse

3. A photo that makes you happy. 6/13/2005: a surprise visit from Dan.

So, this novel started as an idea I’d had back in ’04 based on my experiences as a product sample photographer (my title was “Web Marketing Manager” or some such) at Alco Industries in Cranbury, New Jersey. The idea was that after thousands of mundane and ordinary housewares samples (candle holders, picture frames, flatware, etc.) the main character receives a sample that is somehow otherworldly, somehow transformative, which leads him on a quest to find its maker, to find out the meaning behind this object. Apparently, at times, I’d had real good ideas about where this would go (China?) and how it would all work out, but they must have been forgotten, because….

So, it seemed like it was just turning into a straight up memoir (boring) until I realized I’d been writing a lot about my perception of many of the people I’d met in New Jersey as aliens. And then, somehow, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a zombie apocalypse during all this? Forget the beautiful sample. Let’s just have mass chaos and destruction.”

I know, I know. It’s obviously influenced by the series premier of The Walking Dead and the glut of other zombie-related fiction/film/TV that we’re seeing every day. It’s been done. But, I’m cool with that.

And today’s picture is appropriate — Dan and Karen were two of the very few non-alien people I met in NJ. For my 30th birthday, Dan and Karen flew to Chicago and hung out for the weekend. And Dan (cleverly disguised with a different name) will feature prominently in the story.

It’s Still Alive….

2. A photo of yourself a year ago. From Pic-A-Day Nano2k9

25 minutes into day 2. Over 3500 words which isn’t bad for a novel that I constantly feel the urge to bash about the head.

Novembers are melancholy beasts. Bad things happen in November. Every time.

Here are the first couple lines:

“You’d better get going, Arthur. The photos won’t take themselves,” she said, and she laughed, as if she had said something clever, which she hadn’t.

Here We Go Again

Current Facebook profile photo: Adam and Mom; 1979(?)

The last 12 hours have seen me go back and forth on whether or not I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year. At midnight, I dutifully created a new GoogleDocs document, and started typing. I went with an idea I’d had for NaNo2K4 but hadn’t completed. Over the course of the next hour, I wrote about 1400 words, each worse than the one before it. I put it aside and played some DJ Hero, figuring I’d just give up on the whole thing. It was a weak idea 6 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better.

Then, of course, today, I wrote some more. So, we’ll see. Each night I’ll go to sleep thinking that I won’t finish, each morning, I’ll write more. Who knows?

This year, instead of the usual photo-of-Adam-every-day that I’ve done before, I’m going to go with a photo-a-day meme that Halsted was doing, which I will list here:

  1. your current facebook profile photo
  2. a photo of yourself a year ago
  3. a photo that makes you happy
  4. a photo of the last place you went on holiday
  5. a photo that makes you sad
  6. a photo that makes you laugh
  7. a photo of someone you love
  8. a photo of your favorite band/musician
  9. a photo of your family
  10. a photo of you as a child
  11. a photo of you in your 20s
  12. a photo of you
  13. a photo of your best friend(s)
  14. a photo of one of your relatives
  15. a photo of you and someone you love
  16. a photo of you at a party
  17. a photo of you drunk
  18. a photo of you at work
  19. a photo of you at a restaurant
  20. a photo of something you enjoy doing
  21. a photo of you wearing something you wore when you were younger but wouldn’t wear now
  22. a photo of your town
  23. a photo of one of your pets
  24. a photo of you that your hair looks nice in
  25. a photo of a night you loved
  26. a photo of you at Christmastime
  27. a photo of last summer
  28. a photo of something you cooked or baked
  29. a photo of someone you find attractive
  30. a photo of you when you were happy