Picking up hitchhikers

Since summer has finally decided to turn its ignorant cheek and fold its glorious, sun-shimmering self over Wisconsin, one of my friends and I decided to take a drive through the back roads of our little section of the state. With the windows rolled down, the radio turned up - regrettably like a lot of friends, we disagree on styles of music, but we found a way to compromise - and all the haphazard arrays of trash that lives on the floorboards of her car blowing around our feet, we sought out tantalizingly winding country roads that whispered promises of things to come.

This friend I haven't known too long, maybe a little more than a year, maybe a little less, it's hard to remember sometimes. But when we first met I found her intriguing. She had a certain flair that guaranteed her a sticking spot in your mind as if her memory were like a fresh fly strip set out in a cow barn every hour, so the maximum amount of flies would stick to it at any one time. Not a very glamorous simile, I know, but there it is. From that first moment of meeting her I knew I wanted to get to know her better, so I set about calling her, delving into her world while I shared bits of my own, eventually the two were intermingling.

But on this certain day we were to meet, something different would happen. While the wind played a rough but joyous song through our hair, the radio's voice at once choked and carried thinly on that same wind, the car groaning and bouncing around and underneath us atop the ill-kept country roads...there was a single person trudging towards that same road. Perhaps she could hear the laughter, hear the car crunching over the sharp-toothed potholes of the asphalt. Or perhaps she just felt like taking a gamble today, for no reason in particular. It was perhaps the kind of feeling one gets when passively watching TV and abruptly craving caffeine, of any form, and even while you find your legs restless with the thought your mind is weighed down by the knowledge that it's nearly nine o'clock at night, but some part of you, perhaps greater and more persuasive than your brain, is ignorant to this fact, and so you shuffle into your kitchen, wondering who or what is controlling your limbs and before your mind can scramble forward, reaching for those reins that were whisked from its hands so violently...

The car is slowing down, the single person now stands at the crumbling shoulder, bony arm extended like a dilapidated, abandoned lighthouse still attempting to beckon, even though the once roiling sea beyond is as dry as its splintering brick throat. The radio is turned down, the wind ceases its full-throated song and instead retreats quickly from the interior of the vehicle, leaving the myriad piles of trash to dance aimlessly then flutter somewhat embarrassed to the floorboards, perhaps somewhat haltingly. The single person swivels their head, hair of an indiscriminate color, the same goes for the eyes which hide behind uniform black squares, which would come to be significant in the future when it came to her, only in a metaphorical sense.

My friend turns the radio down even further, leaning over me to gaze out of my window at the person still standing on the shoulder of the road. Her arm slowly drops to her side, the thumb relaxing to rest amongst the other fingers. I feel my own gaze searching those black squares, feeling like a person trying to a read a book of braille with no fingers, or fingers with no sight. My friend, still leaning over me, opens her mouth, her face so close to mine I can smell the strong mint flavor of her bubblegum, and I'm assuming she's about to pose the question "do you need a ride?" when those black squares swivel, catching a thick band of dying evening light - which causes me to glance at the sun standing still and brooding behind a windbreak of trees separating two undulating gold fields.

But it isn't just the black squares that move, its also the sandal-clad feet, and the spindly arms. She crosses the front of the vehicle, the only noise the scraping of her cheap flip-flops on the crumbling concrete...and then the driver's side door opens, my friend raises her hands and arms, but the fingers aren't splayed, and her head isn't down. In fact, glimpsing the corner of her mouth before she is tugged lightly from the seat, I catch a smile, faint but there, as if she had been, what? anticipating this? Could it be?

No time for questions, I tell myself, as the black squares reflect me fully and then turn towards the dirt-streaked windshield. The key turns in the ignition, the gearshift taken in one hand, and then the same mantra continues, only the road before us dissolves away like chess pieces on a picnic table on a windy day. Leaning forward I notice its still a narrow country road unfurling like a crimped and faded ribbon, and there are still rolling fields flanking each side of the road, but somehow it feels different. And I know it isn't only due to the fact that someone new has taken the wheel, her gaze riveted to the windshield and the expanding countryside beyond.

As I settle in my seat, this new meandering road trip in the country a mystery to me, I can't help but wonder where it will take me, and why my previous road trip was severed so abruptly. I had thought things were going smoothly, and - dare I speak it? - could even sense a vague but somewhat solid ending to it all, something that I had found myself within reach of before, but only been disappointed in the end. Would this time be different, I thought?

"We're here." I start at the gravely voice coming from the driver's seat. Glancing quickly at the black squares I find my attention brought again to the windshield. Only this time it isn't a fraying, crimped ribbon before us but the red, crumbling dirt of the Oklahoma plains. Undulating fields of the Midwest have been seemingly violently ironed out until they simply stretch all around us in great, baldy patches of summer-parched grass and deep gouges where I assume tornadoes have churned their flinty teeth.

A low groan sounds to my left. She is getting out of the car. Fingering the release on my seat belt I step outside as well, looking down at the oddity of my pale skin against such a foreign color of soil. Footsteps crunch ahead, she is making her way towards a pair of tall, round silos leaning into the dying evening light, one sporting a rusting, hole-ridden metal cap while the other has only a shell of one, crude steel bars forming a skeleton atop its sturdy lip. Perusing her in a odd half-gait of a walk and jog I let my eyes roam the area around me, noticing nothing more significant than insipid Oklahoma plains and the two silos. Where were we, I wondered?

"My name is Chassyl," she yells to me and I feel my neck crack as I glance sharply upwards. She is sitting on the lip of the leaning silo, her feet now free of the flip flops. With a halo of burning evening sun around her I now notice her hair is perhaps a dark red, or is it a dark brunette? Still impossible to tell, but somehow with more questions piling on top of one another like the basket of dirty towels in the basement no one wants to wash, despite the dwindling supply of clean towels in the closet upstairs, she was become more defined to me, certain features manifesting themselves when I wasn't looking, or wasn't thinking about their absence too much.

"Sorry I had to boot your other friend out of the car," the gravel bed is cleared from her throat. "But I just felt like you needed to get to know me a little bit before you went back to her. I felt myself fading, standing there for those three or four days, waiting for you to finally turn down that road. You know, you should really get that 'no vacancy' sign fixed at that ramshackle motel in your head, that place was so crowded I couldn't believe it! And some of those people have been there since your middle school days! I had quite the conversations with them, and I guess now I can see why they don't mind staying so long, it really is a nice place, even if the motel decor and the building itself reminds me of some small-town, eighties trucker stop."

"What did you say your name was?" I rub my neck, which is by now sore from tilting my head up to look at her. She swings her feet against the silo, the halo of sun retreating now, casting her in uniform shadow again.

"Chassyl," she says, adding a laugh. "But you'll need to know more than that. Come up here and look at this. You'll get a better view from up here, believe me," she adds when I spin around, searching for the place of interest her finger points to. I cock an eyebrow, glancing up the length of the silo. She throws her head back and laughs. I step onto the third rung from the bottom.

"You remind me of my best friend Augie, her real name is Augustine, but no one but her father calls her that, because he can never remember she doesn't like to be called anything but Augie. You'll get to know her too, she's great. She's afraid of heights just like you. Funny how she ended up being best friends with me, right?"

"I guess so," I mumble, looking down as I pulled myself up two more rungs. Just then a ripple of deep-throated thunder cascades through me, making my hands ache as the vibrations travel through the metal ladder rungs.

"You love Oklahoma right?" I glance up at her, realizing I'm swaying slightly and pull myself closer to the rungs. "Then you're going to watch to hurry up and watch another beauty of a thunderstorm roll in. You only get the slow-movers like these in the summer, and they're fun to watch that's for sure."

And that was how I ended up on the very top of an abandoned silo, sitting next to someone I knew only as Chassyl but somehow already knowing we would be friends, even if it was only temporarily, but like all the others crowded into that outdated, seventies-embracing motel in my mind, she would find an empty room and sit patiently, knowing she was stored away safely, and not forgotten.

All right, just in case I need to clarify, none of that actually happened. Well okay, some of it did, but only in my head. And what I mean by that is. I was plodding along, working on a novella where the main character is Lorraine Lansing - the girl at the beginning of the blog post - but then suddenly Chassyl appears on the shoulder, pulling Lorraine gently aside and she takes me to two leaning silos in the middle of red-dirt Oklahoma with a summer thunderstorm drunk on humidity is rolling in and she's sitting on - of all things! - a silo. I used the above metaphorical story to portray the humorous way my mind has of focusing on one story, then interrupting itself to start another - or as I put it in the story, picking up a hitchhiker.

Because in all truth, Chassyl is a hitchhiker, it's just that she's a fictional one! I mean, when you think about, I know nothing about her besides her name and the fact that she's female, yet last night I sat down to write four pages of one random moment in her life and found that I was extremely satisfied with that. Also ironically, while I was at work jacketing books today I thought of a snippet of Chassyl's best friend's past, which would be her best friend Augustine - oh, excuse me, Augie - so I got up and snagged the little notebook I keep in my purse to write it down. But still, you can't expect to get the whole picture with only a few jigsaw puzzles right? But wait, there's more! I also have a vague idea of Chassyl's home life, and she also owns a black gelding named Clandy - which is short for Clandestine, yes I know, not only do I give my characters absurd names, horses apparently don't escape the habit either!

And you might be wondering, what's the whole bit about the 'hotel in your head'? Well, the way I see it is this. Since I'm never able to turn any one character away and whatever haphazard storyline they come with shoved into some dilapidated, outdated and beat-up suitcase they happened to find, I started thinking of my mind as a shabby motel for all of them, and the 'no vacancy' sign never turns on no matter how hard I try. Albeit when I really think about...would I ever want it to turn on? After all, then I risk the chance of passing by intriguing characters like Chassyl, or even Lorraine Lansing! Who is, honestly, one of my favorite characters I've ever created. I mean, how often do you meet someone who doesn't like to wear pants right?

In closing, I can only hope I encounter many more interesting characters within the span of my literary lifetime, and even dare to dream of revisiting some of them in possible novella series or just for the pleasure of rereading things I've writte in the past, perhaps smiling inwardly at the memory of the first day I picked up a hitchiker...and knew it could only get better from there.

My heart knows something my brain doesn't know

Ahh yes, even if I can't cobble together a satisfying blog post each Wednesday, there's nothing like an interesting title to satisfy me! This week's blog post is no different. Now I hope that didn't sound self-indulgent, but if I may digress for a while - like I need permission right? ;) - I've always been a big "title-oholic", now you ask, what the heck does that mean? I'll give you a moment to scratch your head, perhaps I'll join you in your confusion as well!

Albeit it is by no means a necessity in the beginning stages, a title for a novella, a short story, a novel, a poem or any other body of creative work, I've always been obsessed with coming up with a title for each novella I write. Why, you ask? I guess because it gives each novella a firmer foundation. And yes, I know, I can write a hundred-plus story on little more than a glimpse of an abandoned house alongside a narrow country highway, or a single detached scene that glistens in my mind like a sparkling web of sunshine atop a wind-rippled lake, only there is a film of gray clouds above, and the water reflects its tones like a solemn tombstone. Oh dear, here come the similes!

But I think a title gives me more of a clearer vision for that particular novella. Enter the current novella I'm working on: the only title I have for it is "the white Victorian story", why that you ask? Well because frankly the main character lives in a white Victorian! And a beautiful one at that, ;). So why doesn't this particular novella have a title? Honestly? I can't even begin to think of one. Usually I'll try to congeal all the things the story is mainly about and try to stretch a thin subject over all of them like crusty pie dough over a bulging raspberry filling. When that fails I just sit back in my chair, body going limp while my brain picks up the slack and trots off, well sometimes running, it depends on the amount of slack in my limbs and the staccato of my fingertips on the edge of my desk.

Now we've all heard of songs that have titles seemingly unrelated to what they're about, and I don't know about you but at the end of said songs I'm left scratching my head, my skin twitching with irritation and confusion. How did they come up with that title? Why did they come up with it? Does it have a hidden meaning? That last one really gets me, you know? But enough of the unanswerable questions, there's more digressing to do!

Actually, I think I'm plumb out of digressing, imagine that? On to the topic of today's post! Which is...whether you're a writer or not I'm sure you've heard the phrase "write what you know". And today, because of what I do for my job four hours, three days a week, my mind is allowed to go wandering off into the happy land of haphazard thoughts and boundless imagination while my limbs operate on auto-pilot and continue jacketing book after book. Well anyway...while my mind was in its happy place, I started thinking about what the phrase "write what you know" really means...at least to me! ;) You see, at first I took it literally, like to actually write what you know meant to writing about what you understand, or what you are familiar with, like your every day surroundings and whatnot.

Then I started thinking, once my mind had gone a little further and I realized there wasn't going to be any getting it back any time soon and my limbs continued whistling a plethora of tunes stuck in my head and jacketing book after book, what if the phrase "write what you know" really means...write what your heart knows? Does that sound incredibly corny to you, or it is just me? Sometimes I wish my mind could come up with better "tag-lines", so to speak, but another part of me is tempted to say i don't shiv a git. ;) Either way that one question sparked today's blog post - well, not the beginning part of it! - and I'm still thinking about it today.

As I was relaying to my fellow 'sister' on Facebook today - and fellow occasional blogger! - considering what I write primarily about A) Old houses B) Thunderstorms and tornadoes C) Oklahoma D) Small towns and E) New England...how the hell can I take the phrase "write what you know" literally? I have never directly experienced or really 'know' any of these things! Well, only in my head that is, which may count on some levels, but most of those are in fiction writing. So then I started thinking, what if it is what is in the heart? After all, if I've written about old houses, Oklahoma, thunderstorms, tornadoes and New England since middle school, hell there's got to be something of that red muscle buried in each of those subjects somewhere right?

The only problem is, is that along with a seemingly sourceless passion for all said subjects, my heart forgot to inform my brain on even the basic facts on any of them. Or each just came with a pre-assembled frame or apparatus - to quote my great aunt! - without any instruction manual so if it breaks or happens to fall apart, I'd be left scrambling to figure out how the hell to piece it back together, or its like buying a house without physically seeing it and yet stepping onto the threshold and realizing it was everything you ever wanted, even before you've glimpsed all those rooms silently waiting beyond your line of sight.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know I could do research and what not, but honestly? It's all a big bore to me. And that leads me back to my sometimes-cumbersome writing style, which is basically plant my fingers on the keyboard, open up all the lines from those rusted, over-filling filing cabinets in my head to each finger and let the papers fly! Then possibly...maybe...sort them out later once they've fallen onto the digital paper before me on the smudged screen of my laptop. So what then, you ask? Am I forever doomed to being in the dark when it comes to what I love to write about but know nothing about? My answer to that is...hopefully no! I do intend some day to own an old house that is crumbling away and restore it, and I do wish to bear witness to a violent thunderstorm and hopefully glimpse a tornado, and yes, I do hesitantly wish to live in Oklahoma or New England, whether it be in the isolated countryside or a town so small the population number doesn't even need a comma, or three numbers.

Why my heart picked such things to love and leave my head glaringly empty with the basic facts? Well perhaps its irony, or a way to nudge me from my stubborn, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants writing style and actually dig my trowel deeper into that loamy soil until I find something solid, perhaps the beginnings of a root, of a passion, of something I can learn about from its beginnings. I sense another rambling coming on, and I also sense a looming bedtime. Better stop this horse while I can still see the house amidst these frollicking pastures bending the golden rays of evening's light.

Another cassette in the tape deck of my life

(Photo property of Google) It's ironic when you think about it, but whenever I download music onto my iPod more often than not it's from the 90's, late 80's and sometimes when I cast aside my cynical eye on music of the 2000's, I'll download a few tunes from this decade as well.

Now obviously I'm not the only one who downloads old music onto my iPod, and I also know music from the 80's and 90's isn't all that old, but I guess what I'm getting at is...even as the technology I use to download music, like my iPod Nano - nope, I still don't have an iTouch but they look awesome! - the music I download sure isn't going forward, so to speak, but is instead going backward. How so, you ask? Well, let me tell you!

And here my friends, is where the title for today's post comes in. You see, I love metaphors and use them to describe different aspects of my life. Now I'm sure if you've read my blog regularly you would be familiar with the metaphor I often use to describe my mind, or my conscious, or my memory...which is that rambling, narrow-corridor room of burnt or faded yellow filing cabinets with their overstuffed drawers and dented, rusted doors where all my haphazard thoughts for stories and every day life are crammed in non-alphabetical order and the floorboards upon which each row of cabinets sits sags and the gaps between the floorboards allow random sheets to fall through, and sometimes they become a topic for a novella or blog post. Have I mentioned I love metaphors? Well anyway, the one that I was supposed to be talking about is the one hinted at in today's blog post. I think I first talked about in a failed novella series I tried to write about two or three summers ago called Wide Open Spaces. So long ago was this in fact that I can only remember the metaphor vaguely, but then again I only need a crumpled sheet of paper to fall between those cracks with vague and faded scribblings on it to start something now don't I? And additionally, I'm rambling on about this vague notion aren't I? You're probably waiting for me to get to the point aren't you? Well, the truth is, so am I! Sometimes I think I'm a passive spectator to my own writing, like I'm not even sitting in this chair right now, but as for who is writing? That's a mystery to me, folks!

Instead of saying anyway again, I'll just reveal the mystery to this tape deck metaphor. As I was explaining before some external force took over my keyboard, a while back in a failed novella series I had mentioned somewhere along the line that everyone's life comes with a tape deck, and what I mean by that is - yes, I know more 90's talk! I can't tell you how deep I am in the 90's! - I picture everyone driving along every day in their lives with this huge wall of tape decks behind them, and every day these different tapes play, are they songs? are they moments? are they words? I'm not sure, I guess they could be all of those things and more. But I guess what the main thing that metaphor was about is also what today's post is supposed to be about: recently I've gotten back into the music of David Meece. Now if that name doesn't ring a bell somewhere within the music-loving section of your brain, I wouldn't be surprised, because you see David Meece was a huge Christian/Pop artist in - you guessed it! - the 90's! and when I was younger and learning how to ride my bike without training wheels and failing my parents would bring me to these therapeutic riding programs so I could learn to balance and therefore ride my bike successfully!

Well on the way there and back my parents would play David Meece tapes in their 1994 Dodge Caravan - which my dad still drives, lol! - and I vividly remember those humid, brightly-lit summer days riding in the van - which was still new back then! or more new than it is today, lol - and listening to the music of David Meece, and even after decades of not hearing or purposely seeking out his music online or otherwise, I could still remember the lyrics and that blissful, inimitable sound of the 90's that I love so much and find so inspirational. Well the remembering the lyrics stuff could be due to the fact that I have an uncanny ability to remember song lyrics after only a few times of listening to any one song, but that's beside the point! My mind is like a sponge that only soaks up a certain kind of water, and more often than not it's that murky, questionable stuff that huddles in the potholes of country roads, or the bottom of an unwashed glass at your grandpa's house he somehow keeps looking over every time you visit him.

Why did I get back into David Meece's music? Well I think it all boils down to me wanting to recapture that certain tape deck of that moment of my life. I mean, don't we all look back on our childhoods and want to recapture something, and I guess for me the simplest and most effective way to do that is through music. Now granted, I'm not going to recapture all of the music, only the stuff that I can see myself listening to for decades after, which is why I downloaded several David Meece songs onto my iPodsome modern music residing on my iPod, but it's few and far between, and probably always will be. I guess...and here comes another metaphor folks!!! - when I think about music of the 90's and the music of today I picture myself standing in the middle of a narrow, dilapidated country road that continues ahead of me in its currently crumbling and pockmarked state where leaning wooden and rusting barbed wire fences border it and equally leaning and paint-stripped abandoned houses yearning for a gentle touch and a lingering eye dot its waist-high swaying grasses with their smooth, Summer wind whispers and behind me that same country road broadens and becomes a smooth, glistening blacktopped road that leads to a city jutting and spiraling into the sky where it slices wounds deep and feeds on the blood that pours down, where cars glint sharply in the sun, snarling poison into the air, where bars curl over windows like hooded eyes averting your stare, lips clamping tight so they won't have to utter that single word...hello, and I find myself - obviously! - turning towards that crumbling road, finding beauty in its neglected state, the simpleness of that beauty, and my heart bursts and floods me to my trembling lips with a liquid flow of emotion and I run towards those leaning houses, divided between leaving them as they are and nudging them towards something similar. But then I would run the risk of dragging them into the modern world and that would be unforgivable.

And such is the extent to my obsession with old houses! As you can see. But after all, it is the countryside, old houses, abandoned old houses and old things in general! - like music, cars and whatnot - that have fueled my love of metaphors to begin with. And as a conclusion!! Next week I will discuss my future dream of one day living in several different decades - or eras, whatever the heck you want to call them! - at once. Confused? Well, then you'll have to wait 'til next week Wednesday to have clarification! Perhaps I will too. ;)