life imitating art

Apologies for not updating this as regularly as I'd planned. You can read up on all the crap that's been going on in my life over at my other blog. After next week, though, when Mayterm wraps up, and I'll be moved into my new digs in Belfast, I should be returning to my regularly scheduled broadcast.

I've been having literary moments of late. Not moments of reading literature, but moments where it seems my life is being written by someone else. For example:

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm the fifth generation of my family to live in this house. As my siblings all bought houses, this began to feel like a responsibility. When Mom finally moved on (from this house of from this life) it would be up to me to keep the house in the family. Some days this felt like a burden and some times like it could be a joyous thing, carrying on tradition, living here, having my own kids who would inherit this house one day. Since I moved back here five years ago I've been working to fix the place up, knowing it would either increase resale value and help my mom, and/or make it a nicer place for me to live.

One part of the property that I always wanted to work on but never got around to was the apple orchard. Fifty years or so ago, my dad planted a dozen or so apple trees. They'd been neglected for decades, and were choked out by maple saplings, but miraculously they still produced fruit. With some judicious pruning and clearing, they could be brought back to life. It was one of those things I'd planned to do if I bought the place.

But a few months ago I gave up on the idea of buying this house. It's time to start new traditions, new stories elsewhere. As soon as I decided this, I immediately felt lighter and happier and knew it was the right choice.

Last week I discovered that all the apple trees had been cut down.

With all the rain that's fallen, the river is higher than it has ever been this time of year, at least in my lifetime. We get a flood every year when the snow melts, but never this late in the year. Since the floodwaters are so high, so late, it means the beavers, who never stray far from the shoreline, have access to all kinds of trees that were never in their reach before. In all those years they've never been able to get at those trees, until now.

It seems a little too symbolic for real life.

I walk down the streets of what has been my hometown for so many years. In a week, it won't be my hometown anymore. There's a house I've walked by hundreds of times taking a shortcut to get to campus. It is immaculately groomed, in perfect shape, but I've never seen anyone there. It has been a mystery to me for more than a decade. Who lives there? Why does it look lived in when nobody is ever there?

Today I walked by and there's a guy with NH plates on his car, tidying things up. No mystery there. Just another Maine property owned by someone from away who only spends a couple weeks out of the year there.

There's a woman who lives in a house at the top of the hill. I pass by her house almost every day, but I've never seen her face. She's outside often, working around her house. She's often wearing a bikini, so I know what 90% of the rest of her body looks like, but somehow, her face is always obscured. She's either facing away from the street or carrying a big bag of groceries, or something. One time I walked by and she was working in the flower bed in front of the house, facing the street, and I thought for sure that it would be the day I finally got to see her face. But right when I got up to her, she leaned over to work the ground at the base of a fence post, the post blocking her face from my view! This has happened dozens of times now, like a sitcom. What was it? Home Improvement, where we never saw the next door neighbor's face.

So, it is all riding on this. If someone else is writing my life, then this is the week I see her face. It is series finale time, time for all these plot threads to be tied up. Maybe she's a long lost love, ironically living just a few hundred feet away for all these years. Maybe her face is so hideous I'll scream. It doesn't matter, though. There's so much mystery tied up in it now, anything will be anticlimactic. But if the week ends and I don't see her face, then I'm free. Nobody is writing my story but me.

episode two: dead girls

(spoiler alert: don't read this unless you've read chs. 1 &2)

People die in this town.

That's no suprise. People die everywhere. What I mean is, people die badly here in Orono, Maine. Only they aren't supposed to. We get maybe a dozen murders, tops, per year in the State of Maine. In a town like Orono murder can't possibly happen. So when it does it is met with denial.

Her name was Hannah. I didn't know her personally, but I was friends with people who did. Hannah "committed suicide" a few years back. Because the police decided immediately that she'd committed suicide, they never bothered to look for clues that might have proved otherwise:

Hannah was a happy person with lots of friends, and had never shown any signs of being suicidal.
She'd just bought Christmas presents for her family and friends, and was talking about how much she was looking forward to Christmas.
There was no suicide note.
There were no powder burns.
She'd just started dating a guy who, it turns out, was just out of jail.

When these facts were brought to the police they said, well, she was probably cleaning her gun and it went off. Problem is, Hannah's dad was a cop. Hannah grew up around guns and gun safety was something she was fanatic about. Even though she didn't have kids, she always kept a lock on her gun when she wasn't using it at the shooting range.

It hurts just to think about what it must have been like for her friends and family. To have lost someone they loved, and to know that most likely she was murdered, but that the police destroyed any evidence that might prove this. To have, instead, your loved one held up to public ridicule and scorn for being a suicide. To spend the rest of your life not knowing the truth. What do you do? How do you heal from that?

If you're in Orono, stop by the Bear Brew Pub. There's a plaque to Hannah at the left end of the bar. Pay your respects to Hannah. I wish I could give more testament to her life, but sadly, all I really know about is her death and how much it hurt her friends.

There was another incident just a couple years ago. A student killed herself by hanging herself from a tree near her dorm. All I have to go by on this one are rumors. Suicides rarely make the news because they are seen as so shameful, and they want to protect the family, supposedly. So this student killed herself, but something about it just didn't sit right to me. She'd just gotten off the phone with her boyfriend and was going down to meet him. Again, there was no suicide note. Again, from what I hear, she was a happy person who showed no signs of being suicidal. And we're supposed to believe that in the short walk to meet her boyfriend her life suddenly turned so tragic that she spontaneously hung herself?

Just another teenage suicide. The police didn't bother to look for any other clues. I'm not sure it even made the papers, so the dead girl never even had a name. It happened in the fall. The University instituted an October Break policy years ago. AKA the Suicide Break because so many students killed themselves during that time period.

But this is a quiet town, and bad things like murder are things that only happen in other towns.

Episode Two Now Broadcasting

I just uploaded Episode Two.

Additonally, I have added the "LIT MA LSV" designation to the home page, for Literature (as opposed to TV) Mature Audiences, Language, Sex, Violence. This is adapted from the tvguidelines.org web page. Their definition of TV MA LSV is as follows:

Mature Audience Only
This program is specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17. This program contains one or more of the following: graphic violence (V), explicit sexual activity (S), or crude indecent language (L).

I do a lot of work with elementary school kids, so some might get the impression I write for them too. While I make no promises that this work will offend you, it isn't intended for immature audiences, or for those with weak stomaches, or for people who are easily offended by things they disagree with and want to be protected from them.

just for one day

Castles is a work of heroic fiction in the old-school sense. I saw an interview with George Lucas years ago on his reasons for doing the original Star Wars. He was hanging out with Joseph Campbell and they were talking about heroes (big suprise there) and the hero's role in culture. They are more than just for telling entertaining stories about. Heroes are role models, showing what is good and noble in a culture, inspiring us to be the best we can be. At least, traditionally this is what they've been, though I think in our own culture we've largely lost our heroes. Lucas thought so too, and he set out to create new heroes.

Lucas seems to have abandoned this with the last two movies (one reason among many why these movies are so awful). I can see why, though. It is simultaneously anachronistic, idealistic and fascistic. Fascistic, because to create a hero in the traditional sense, you have to believe that you know what is best for society and be willing to impose that view on others. Idealistic because to even bother trying you have to believe that you can make a difference, and that it is worth it to try. Anachronistic because America doesn't have heroes anymore. Not really. Heroes have been replaced by celebrity cults. Really, how many people can you point to and say, "I wish my kids would grow up to be like that person," or, "I wish I were more like that." There might be someone, but for most people in America it is because they make a lot of money, or a good at sports or a really famous, not because they're good people or have done anything to make the world a better place.

If the hero's is a reflection of what is good and virtuous in society, how can such a being exist in ours? We live in a cultural bipolar disorder. On the one pole concepts of right and wrong and morality are just marketing gimics. They're ways of furthering one's own agenda by opressing others. Think of the "religious right" (In quotes because they're neither) with their "We don't like it, therefore it is evil and immoral and should be prohibited" attitude or the Republican party's "Support the President or you're unAmerican," propaganda, where even questioning or voicing dissent is seen as immoral. On the other pole we have cultural relativism where every view is accepted and tolerated, and others can only be judged according to their own culture or upbringing, which makes the only real "immoral" act that of hypocrisy. Unless you yourself say that something is wrong, and then you don't live by that standard, nothing you do can be considered immoral.

I can see why Lucas would whimp out. Seems to me, though, that we need heroes now more than ever.

Do kids today have heroes? Do they have any examples they can look at and want to be when they grew up? I was lucky. I was an anachronism. I loved the old heroes: Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes and John Carter and Doc Savage. Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not sure Captain Underpants really counts as a hero.

I'm not claiming to have created a "hero for our times." Castles is an exploration, an attempt to come up with a modern definition of a hero, one that can survive in a culture of diversity and contradiction, one that can be virtuous and noble but still "real".

After writing a novel about it and thinking about it for years, I'm not sure I'm any closer to figuring out what a hero is. I can point out a few examples. My own father, for instance. Before his aneurism, he was town manager of several different towns. One time a contractor tried to bribe my father with the gift of a house if my father approved his permit for a housing development. My father knew the contractor to be a good man, but at the time (and moreso today, I'm sure) the system was just so corrupt that you had to bribe your government officials in order to get anything done. I think about my dad back then, a young man supporting a wife and four kids, and how much he could have used the money, and how everyone around him was doing it, so he could have gotten away with it, easy. But he refused the bribe. And he still gave the guy the permit! That to me is one quality of a hero. Doing the right thing even when it isn't necessarily in your benefit. My dad also got curbside recycling started in Durham, NH in the 70s, twenty years before people in general realized how important it was. And he got a sewage treatment plant going that turned waste into usable compost instead of dumping it into the ocean. He saw problems and he solved them in ways that were best for the environment and the future, not because they were the cheapest, easiest or most politically beneficial ways.

I hope I live up to his example. Sometimes I might, but mostly, I'm no hero.

Remembering Welch

Now that I think about it, Welch may have been the first positive adult male role model I ever had. Not that I'm saying my own father was really a bad influence, but... well... he had a brain aneurism when I was 5 that left him brain damaged. I'm told he was a great man before this. A man of intelligence, honor and integrity. The father I know, however, sat around and watched TV a whole lot, ate too much junk food and dug through trash cans to find returnables like a homeless person. He couldn't carry on conversations or offer guidance or advice or do any of those things I hear dads are supposed to. I guess I didn't have it too bad though. At least he wasn't physically abusive. No wait, yes he was, until I got big enough to hurt back. Guess I really did get the short end of the stick as far as fathers go.

I met Welch when I was a freshman in college (first year student, in case you're unfamiliar with the term "freshman". The PC 90s changed that. IMHO, it should have been changed to Person of Fresh). I knew from that start that I'd be an English major, creative writing concentration. As long as I could remember I wanted to write novels. I never had the ambition to write the Great American Novel, as most English majors do. I wanted to write pure entertainment. Books that might not change you in any way, but that once you started reading, you couldn't put down again. The early Stephen King, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, they helped me escape for days on end while I was growing up. I was also a b-movie fanatic, watching every sci-fi and horror movie I could find. I found brilliance and inspiration in movies like Attack of the Giant Leeches the way respectable people found in Citizen Kane.

Of course I had to meet Welch. Welch Everman was a professor in the English department at the University of Maine. Academia may have become less hostile toward pop culture since the 80s, but back then Welch was a radical. He'd make analalogies between Hamlet and the latest twists in pro wrestling, and he had no trouble shelving comic books next to the "great classics of literature." Welch was my academic advisor. Advising sessions consisted of sitting in his office as he smoked cheap cigarettes while we discussed obscure horror movies that only the two of us had ever seen. Then he'd sign my blank class sign-up sheet and I'd fill in the rest on my own.

I think I learned more that way than in any of my classes. One of the most important things I learned from Welch was that the same techniques you'd use to analyze a Shakespeare play could also be applied to the worst monster movie, and that you could learn things from both. I think my whole life is a lot more enjoyable because of this. When you can see how Hamlet connects to pro wrestling, you can make the connection between Hamlet and your own life. Both Hamlet and Pro Wrestling become much more fascinating! All life becomes a text that you can learn from.

Welch also believed in me as a writer. He encouraged me to keep writing and try to get published. It was the first time I ever felt believed in, or encouraged.

Unfortunately, when I left college I persued a career in computer graphics. This effectively killed me as a writer. When you spend all day staring at a computer screen, the last thing you want to do is stare at a computer screen in your free time. Years past, and I lost touch with Welch. I still made attempts at novels now and then, but never made the time for it. Writing is one of my favorite things to do, so it is always the first thing to get sacrificed when things get busy.

Then my dad got Alzheimers and I returned home to help my mom deal with it. I became a student again. I didn't really feel a pressing need to get my masters degree. It was just something to do to keep from going crazy.

Meanwhile, Welch got cancer. All those cheap cigarettes caught up with him. He got through it. Well, "went into remission." Cancer isn't something that is ever cured. I'd always planned on publishing a novel and coming back to show Welch and making him proud. I realized that all Welch might ever see from me was a whole lot of false starts. I felt dissapointed in myself. So I took another creative writing class with Welch, and wrote Castles in one semester, last fall, just so I could prove to Welch and to myself that I could actually finish something. I planned on rewriting it and actually trying to publish it this time.

It was the last class Welch taught. The cancer came back, and I didn't even realize he was dying. Rumors spread fast on campus. I'd hear from one person that Welch was sick and from another that he was doing great. I was out of town when he died, and didn't even find out about the funeral until days later.

When I asked my mother, who works at the University with people who were good friends with Welch, why she didn't tell me, she said, "Oh, I didn't know you knew him."

I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere.

It is only recently that I've been able to talk about this. His loss is heartbreaking to me. I still catch myself thinking, "Oh, I should tell Welch about this!" and realizing I can't, and that I know I can't, and haven't been able to for a long time, and how does something like that slip your mind?

But I'll finish the novel. And I'll get it published. And I'll dedicate it to Welch.