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September 12, 2010

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Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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Twenty-Five Songs for Leaving Places

So, first off, thanks to everyone who showed up last night. It was great seeing you for… well, not the last time, but, you know, for a while.

Anyway, I don’t know anyone who’s good with goodbyes. The person in my family who’s best with them is my brother, and to tell you what that means, here’s a story:

My family had a golden retriever named Pebbles. We got the dog when I was about seven. Second grade, whenever that was.

Pebbles

The Dog

The first memory I have of Pebbles is when my Mom and Dad drove us out to a rescue ranch in rural Ohio. The place was literally full of dogs in need of homes, and my Dad fell in love with a Wookie of a dog named Queenie. However, as chance would have it, as we pulled up and got out of the car, Pebbles, at that time, two years old and hyper as hell, bolted around the side of the house and started circling me, panting and nudging a tennis ball at me. So, yeah, I was the youngest, and we got Pebbles.

Anyway, she made life a lot easier. My parents were divorced a few years ago, and it messed me up more than I thought at the time, but I got off lucky because I had Pebbles to play around with. (You know, in addition to all of my friends and whatnot.) Then, a couple of years later, my Mom and I (Joel having started college) moved down to Tennessee. Tennessee was not my favorite place to be, and, if it weren’t for a few really, really good friends, I probably would have turned into a Goth or some crap, and that just wouldn’t have been any fun. But, through it all, Pebbles was around, and my brother and I essentially had a little sister.

So, midway through my sophomore year at UT, when I heard that Pebbles died after having to deal with severe doggie arthritis, old age, and having a rough time of it all, I was wrecked. I’d like to say that I held it together, but that’s a pretty harsh lie, and it was a rough few weeks. Everyone in my immediate family, especially my Mom, Joel, and I, were sad, but Joel had a pretty Zenned-out attitude towards it all. While my Mom and I were sitting around in the condo sighing, Joel was knocking back drinks in her honor and telling stories about the time she ate a bag of chocolate chip cookies and puked on the bed, wrapped him up in her leash and sabotaged one of his runs, and fought off three Scottish Terriers over her tennis ball. I did this too, don’t get me wrong, but, he managed to sound like a stand-up comedian wheras I sounded bereaved.

The reason I say all of that is to illustrate that I seem to have inherited a terrible weepy gene from my Dad. (The other story I can tell is how, on my Bar Mitzvah, my Dad couldn’t say anything on the bima because he was crying.) Case in point, this leaving business after hanging around for a year is a right bitch, shall we say. As I don’t have a dog around (quite yet), music’s the best way I’ve got of getting some sort of emotional outlet stuff going on (yes, that’s right, I say something like that and I’m a published writer), and so, here’s my Leaving List. Shall we say.

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September 11, 2010

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How To Take Down The Commies

They want this to happen

A while ago, I had a column in the University of Tennessee’s The Daily Beacon. It lasted a semester, and I was kind of surprised when they said they wouldn’t need me around for the Spring semester. I had what you might call a cult following. (Occasionally, someone who looked like they should be in an art class came up to me and said they thought I wrote some funny stuff.)

My columns were essentially nonsequiturs. I didn’t have any desire to report on campus politics, and whenever I talked about what was going on in the Outside World, it was done through heavy satire and a very sarcastic tone. In my defense, the editor never told me that the column had to be about anything. (Never told me anything, now that I think about it.)

No, what concerned me was pop culture and its prevalence in our lives as students. A couple of years before I went into college, my brother made me watch Red Dawn. It was two years before I could talk about it, and, when I finally got over the shock, I found that the only healthy way to express my feelings was via newspaper column.

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September 7, 2010

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Short Stories

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A Published Story, July 2009

This paves a pivotal role in the story.

It just occurred to me that I haven’t put up a link to a story that I actually had published last year. (That’s right kids, if Aaron can do it, so can you!)

“Rocks and Hot Dogs” was a story workshopped in one of my Writing Fiction classes that, a couple of edits later, I blindly submitted to a magazine called Danse Macabre. About a week or so later, I got an e-mail in my inbox that told me that they would publish my story. You can find it here. Hopefully I’ll be able to have more posts with this header in the near future, but, well, that’s up to the editors of websites, isn’t it?

Anyway, here’s the first paragraph to whet your appetite:

Douglas Roth hadn’t written a decent word in over three months. Pages and pages of overly dramatic narration, self-serious commentaries on the human condition, concerned paragraphs dealing with failed relationships and various types of cancer were easy: Everyone on the planet Earth at one point or another suffers from an existential funk or has the extreme misfortune to experience or know someone who is diagnosed with a terrible disease—that’s why his four stories from the past three months had been snatched up almost immediately after he put them in their envelopes. Douglas, though, had always strived to write about something Rare. These Rare things came in a flash of inspiration, usually in disjointed phrases that made no sense and took either a tremendous amount of coffee, tremendous lack of sleep, or tremendous amount of booze to make sense of. Generally, these Rare things were nonsense or had no relevance to anything going on in the modern world and were thus called trite or nonsensical by literatis, but Douglas loved each of them like children and was continuously surprised when someone came up to him in a bar expounding a theory about one of his stories. It seemed that his readers were much, much more intelligent than he was.