Blinding

"So. What do you like to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"I know, I know. Asking about hobbies and such, it's one of those courtesy questions that you don't expect a straight answer, like 'How are you doing?' But I mean it, what do you do to keep yourself busy? To keep from going crazy, you know, and pulling out that blonde hair of yours?"

"I don't know. I like to sing, I guess. I draw a little but mostly I watch TV in my pajamas, mostly. You're laughing at me, but I'm serious, I'm not really an adventurous person, not really. What about you?"

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. What do you do to 'keep from going crazy,' as you put it. The stuff that saves that weird curly red hair of yours."

"Well, I'm just as boring as you, really, except sometimes I get this itch inside of me, you know, just like if you just need a cigarette or something, and I go blinding."

"You go blind? What do you mean?"

"Blinding, not blind. Okay, you're looking at me funny, let me explain. It's this thing I made up. Kind of a game really."

"So you play made-up games, huh? What are you, twelve?"

"Ha. I'm not done explaining it to you. First, you have to be in a car. find an intersection, preferably a traffic signal, and just fly right through?"

"What? Okay, ha, ha, you got me. I'm sorry I called you twelve. You don't have to make up dumb stories about playing chicken in a car to impress me."

"No I'm serious. That's blinding. It's best to play at an intersection at a time of day that you know the traffic won't be heavy. Give yourself a bit of an advantage, you know? I call it blinding because you're driving blind into traffic, get it?"

"Well, I think I--"

"At first you're going to want to close your eyes as you go through. Don't. When you have your eyes open, and you're going for it, you'll probably see another car in the corner of your eye. Maybe you'll make it through, maybe you won't. That glimpse of another car says that odds are stacking against you. When you see that and you make it through, that's living. If you had your eyes closed you wouldn't get the same jolt of energy, the buzz."

"You're not being funny. I'm a little touchy on the subject, because, well. . . because my dad died in a car accid--"

"Oh, and it works at a stop sign, but that's not nearly as good as a traffic signal. You actually have a bit of an excuse with a sign, they're bland red sheets of metal hidden off to the side. It's easy to miss those; people do it all the time accidentally. But traffic signals-- You've got a large red beacon hanging there in the air flashing stop at the speed of light. You've got to do it on purpose to blow through one of those."

"Do, do you have a death wish or something?"

"A death wish? No, of course not. I've got a life wish. I want to live. I want to feel the blood pounding in my veins. I want to taste the boundaries of death and walk away. I want to prove that I am alive. So, yeah, you wear pajamas and watch TV, and I, uh, I do this."

"I, I think you should take me home now."

"Sure, I'll pick up the check and we'll--"

"You know what. . . I'll get a cab instead."


this is not a quote

The Shop Around the Corner

I hereby announce that I have entered into NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated, this stands for National Novel Writing Month. Information can be found here. In a nutshell, it's an event that happens every year, where aspiring novelists such as myself start on November 1st and hopefully conclude November 30th with a 50,000 word novel. I heard about it last year and decided that I would jump on the bandwagon come November.

I am cheating a bit, though. I am going to try to knock out my story that I have been sculpting for 3 years now. It has gone from being "the untitled dream story" (some know it as the Twilight Zone story) to (tentatively) "We Own Your Dreams." Hopefully, by Nov. 30th, it will be We Own Your Dreams. I have maybe 6-8 pages written, and at this rate I'll finish sometime near my death and will certainly have wasted my notebook full of other story ideas and leads. Hopefully this will give me the push I need toward regular writing.

I do consider myself an aspiring novelist (currently I am also an unknown essayist) and others such as myself flock to bookstores such as Barnes and Nobles' or Border's to be amongst the things they love. True, I love reading as well, and these are generally the places I come when I slake that thirst, but I have a different viewpoint of such bookstores.

They are my ninth circle of hell.

Why is this? Because all I've ever wanted to do with my life is be an author. Just like everybody else in those stores. I pour hours and hours of toil and sweat into writing a work and leave a large piece of me within. Somehow, someday someone else picks it up and decides that it should be published. I am overjoyed with this idea and ecstatically go through the long process of rewriting, etc. When the final, finished project is done (probably with a cover picture that I think is stupid, yet I am powerless to change) it is placed on the shelf in the fiction section between Brand, Max, and Brautigan, Richard.

Lost in a sea of thousands no different than it.

If you never say your name out loud to anyone they can never, ever call you by it

I Have Two Guns, One For the Each of Ya.

I have two types of posts. One type I come up with an idea and make out a rough outline of the things I want to say and how I want to say them. I save the draft and let it sit until just the right time. Like wine they age, drawing in influences and nuances from the passing of time. sometimes they ferment for months before I pull them out and finish the process. I have maybe ten of these right now, and the oldest ones date to last March.

The other type is more or less impromptu. Something big may have happened to me that I just have to get down in words, or maybe I'll just get the urge to write and won't have anything officially prepared. This second category, that's this post right here.

I'm thinking of changing emails again. I have my very professional aarontbratcher@yahoo.com, but my main email is brokeneyesglaring@yahoo.com . This one has two strikes against it: apparently I was feeling very emo at the time of its creation and it's embarrassing to give it as an answer to "what's your email?" (It's because I wear glasses, get it? broken eyes glaring. Apparently I'm mad about my myopia). Also, I've done something wrong on the internet somewhere and now I get a ridiculous amount of junk email. Tons. I'm thinking of fully embracing "Bratcher Lev" and go with bratcherlev@yahoo.com, but I'm going to have to sleep on it.

I've been working on the Harry Potter books for about 3 or 4 months now. I started them after seeing the first three movies, but after reading three books that were so similar to three movies I had already seen. . . I lost interest. I've finally passed the point I stopped last time around and am currently in the middle of Goblet of Fire. I'm tempted to say that I am halfway through it, but it's such a brick of a book that despite having read what seems to be the same amount of pages as the whole of the first book, I am only a third of the way through it.

I facebook. Yes. Since Facebook decided money was much more awesome than catering to only collegiates, they have opened a floodgate of third party applications that you can load onto your own page. Most of these are dreadful, and every time I pull up my own page I wade through a sea of applications for Superpokes and Top Friends Lists and Zombie Wars. One such application I did let in was the "sorting hat" application. Just as you could probably guess, you answer several questions, and someone somewhere wrote some code that interprets your answers as a guide to one Hogwarts house. I took the test and it wanted to stick me in Gryffindor. Honestly, I didn't want to be. Not that the house with the most stage time isn't fan tabby tabulous, I'm just not one of those types that immediately go for the main characters. I wasn't Cyclops when we played Xmen, I was Gambit. I was never Ryu when we played Street Fighter, I was Blanka. And I'm not Gryffindor.

So I cheated and put myself in Ravenclaw, the house with which I can honestly relate the most. My thought, though, was "at least I'm not in Hufflepuff."

In fact, I think I'd rather live in the real world where there are no Hogwarts Houses than live in Rowling's world and be in Hufflepuff.

your's is the first face that I saw, think I was blind before I met you

You. It's You.

I've always liked to draw. I used to doodle ninja turtles in all of my notebooks. They were frozen in a perpetual fight against nameless lopsided villains. I was never one of those kids ,though, whose drawings made you think "wow, this kid's actually pretty good".

I finally stopped doodling and didn't draw for the longest times. I never took an art class in school because I was always in band or some other elective. When community college rolled around, I decided to put myself in BASIC DRAWING 101, because, well, because I could. Maybe I could feel that child with the crooked Ninja Turtles within me, desperately wanting to get out.

I really liked it. It almost came easy to me. I did, however, have to keep erasing and erasing until I finally got it just right. Charcoal became an amazing thing to me, and shading was this mystery of science that had eluded me for so long.

After I finished with the class, I kept drawing in my free time. I'd buy crayons and draw brightly colored faces, deeply lined with many colors for shading effects. It's really similar to my photography philosophy (another hobby that I'm spread too thin to properly pursue). All of our family pictures growing up lacked the same single element: our family. There were nice pictures of mountains, and hot rod cars, and birds, but who were we at the time? How old were we and what fashion trends had we succumbed to at the time? Who knows. People are the most important thing to document.

Tangent over.

So I'd always draw people. Mostly faces. And without fail, every single time, someone will come up to me and ask "Who is that?" "Who are you drawing?" as if I had someone posing in front of me, or maybe I knew someone who had a green tinted face. Why does every drawing have to be of somebody? Why can't it just be a face? Start with the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the eyebrows, hairline, and the chin, and how it turns out is how it turns out.

Depending on how crass I felt, I'd sometimes respond with "I'm drawing you."

At some point I moved on to painting. This was a big scary world that I've yet to conquer, or even do more than dip my toes into. I got a portaits books and found a recipe for flesh toned paint and went crazy. I couldn't quite get the mix right, though.

I made purple people.

After a while, I figured out my problem.

Too much blue. Way too much blue.

I only have one of my paintings left. The rest I've given away. My favorite one, though, I still kinda wish I had kept. I didn't paint it for myself, though, so it wouldn't be right for me to keep it. It was painted over Christmas break for a friend. We agreed to bring something back to each other. My problem was this: what could I possibly bring back from Kansas City? I painted her a picture instead.

At least I have a couple of fuzzy cameraphone pictures of it.
Honey, I'm a prize and you're a catch and we're a perfect match
Like two bitter strangers

Springfield Cards

The middle section of my month long (or longer) trip extravaganza took me to the far reaches of man's settlement. I dared the very edges of civilized society so that I may say that I have done so. And later blog about it. Was it the Great Alaskan North? No. Siberia? No again. Antarctica? Not even close. The frozen tundra of wasteland that I visited was none other than Springfield, Missouri (Hyperbole and exaggeration, I know, yadda yadda yadda [no soup for you] ).

Most of our time was spent playing video games, seeing movies, and eating at the restaurants that we had been dreaming about for the past year. I've had several conversations with the boys about how much we all were jonesing for sesame chicken from Hong Kong Inn. Basically, we were living the dream.

One of the final evenings there was spent in a little big stadium hidden in the middle of the city. This is where the Springfield Cardinals played. You may be familiar with the St. Louis Cardinals, and you'd probably assume that there is some sort of association between the two. You would be right. Or wrong. I don't really know. They do have similar emblems (do teams have emblems? Are they logos?) and it seems that half of the inhabitants of St. Louis seem to make their way down to Springfield at some point in their lives.

We were three rows from the dugout and it felt like if I really, really wanted to, I could throw my Pepsi at the first baseman and hit him. This would probably only work once, though. It was all fairly surreal as to how close to the action we were (being a minor league stadium, it is much, much smaller than, say, Kauffman stadium, but just as professional looking). Then I happened to think:

"You know, I've seen on TV where the batter tips the ball just right so that it zings straight to the right. Right, uh, right here where I'm sitting. Oh, crap. I'm going to die."

Sure enough I got hit and needed major reconstructive surgery. Well, not really, but I knew this would be a certainty. Right on cue, a foul ball shot straight at an old man maybe fifteen seats to my left. He jumped to the side as the ball took out his beer in a yellow shower of terror. The man got up, wiped off the beer, and raised up the demolished paper cup, demanding a new one.

I tried my best to pay attention to the game, but most of my energy was spent in preparation for a sudden move. Maybe to the left, maybe the right, but it would certainly have to be one of those things where you act out of instinct and not "Oh hey, I'm about to get laid out by a baseball. I should move, yes?"

Something changed though. The paradigm shifter was named Nick (I think maybe it's spelled Nic) and he's three or four years old. He's Matt's nephew and it wasn't that long ago that he would run screaming, utterly terrified out of the room whenever he saw me. He's warmed up to me and now he decided that he wanted to sit between me and Nick (big Nick, one of the guys that came to Springfield). Being that I enjoy my space, there's an empty seat to my left, and I gave him the go ahead to sit there.

Right where the ball would inevitably fly.

The first half of the game I was perpetually ready to duck out of the way, and the second half, I found myself always ready to throw myself in front of Nic(k) when the ball does come.

Kids. They always change things.

and the stars look very different today

My Name Is Greg

Where have I been?

Not here, that's right.

I've been at Target. Working. Those of you familiar with my Sunfresh employment are probably shaking your collective heads at the notion that I haven't come very far. And to be honest, you're right.

But a job's a job, and I'm happy to have one.

The pay is a little depressing, and every beep of the register is a note in a song whose lyrics go something like this: "I have a Bachelor's Degree. I have a Bachelor's Degree. I have a Bachelor's Degree, and yet I'm doing this." I realized just today that I'd be doing the same thing and being paid the same wage if I were 16 years old. That's eight years ago.

It's not all bad, really. I've got a nice name tag. It's for somebody named Greg, though. I've learned to answer to the name "Greg" and I don't really mind. You can't blame them for thinking my name is Greg, it is on my name tag, after all. And only an idiot would wear a name tag with the wrong name on it.

If I do get an "Aaron" name tag (mental note: see about getting a "Bratch" tag) I may keep Greg and swap them in and out as I see fit ("well, self, is this a Greg day or and Aaron day?" [Maybe a Bratch day?]). I may even work out a system; I'm Aaron if I'm doing something good, and Greg if I screw up.

squeaky swings and tall grass