Writing Project Update

Slaughterhouse is taking the weekend off. Content next Tuesday. Thanks.

Slaughterhouse 66

START TIME: 9:49 PM
END TIME: 10:30 PM
WORD COUNT: 548

"Elaborate on the 'Turtle vs. Hitler's Skull' question; Briefly explain why you would rather display Hitler's Skull than keep a pet Turtle and what you find to be interesting about the idea of Hitler's Skull as an artifact. Then, pick an historical artifact that you would actually like to display in your living room without coercion and explain why."

From the Chuck Klosterman book "Sex, Lies, and Cocoa Puffs" here's one of the questions he asks to determine if he can really love someone:

"3. Let us assume there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler’s skull. You have to select one of these items for your home. If you select the turtle, you can’t give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters are not met, you will be fined $999 by the state. If you select Hitler’s skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, although you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so. Display of the skull must be apolitical.

Which option do you select?"

(I chose Hitler's skull, because I have a hard time with pets with my schedule the way it is.)

I’m not sure that my home is the appropriate place for the display of historical artifacts, but given the premise of the question (which I’m assuming has to do with what value someone places on money, and if they’re willing to do something socially repulsive in order to make a sum of money, versus performing a simple task against the threat of a fine)

My concern about choosing a historical artifact for display is it would have to be interesting enough that I would be willing to look at it all the time, but not so interesting that it would draw throngs of people, or require armed security, or lead to me being interrupted at all hours of the night by even the benignly curious. This rules out most religious artifacts or anything relating to Elvis. It’s also why Bill Gates had no issues with buying Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks – he already lives in a gazillion dollar compound that you can’t just stroll into.

If I had to choose something that were aesthetically pleasing, it would probably have to be small, to be displayed properly. For instance, there’s a Star Wars toy in my curio cabinet, from one of the newer movies that I haven’t seen. At the bottom of it, there’s the word “Coruscant.” If you open it up a little plastic figure floats up and down for a few seconds. Why? What does it mean? It looks and behaves like a little snow globe. Why do I have it?

Because several years ago, my then-wife and I lost a game of Uno with three other couples, and the penalty required us to display said object in a prominent place until the next game. Well, much like Robin Williams in the game “Jumanji”, one of the couples moved back to the Midwest, another player moved to California, we split up and I’m somehow forced to follow these rules as if they were some sort of a blood oath. I’m going to be stuck with this damned thing well into the next life. So the question’s not if I’m capable of doing it; that’s been answered. But what should it be?

I think it would be interesting to have something that looked fairly ordinary, but had a terrific story behind it. I thought that the first wrist watches that were displayed in the Louvre Museum were fascinating, and the knowledge that those were crafted without the benefit of modern tools or even much in the way of lighting or magnification boggled the mind.

Maps would be excellent. How on earth did Lewis and Clark know that river went in that direction? I have a GPS-enabled phone and I can’t find my way through clearly marked neighborhoods with signs. These guys found prairie dogs! I’m not good with vermin, so when these guys hauled off and sent one to President Jefferson as a gift, that might have been taking the exploratory spirit a little too far.

Ultimately, my home is a spectacularly bad destination for a historical artifact, and I’m more of a “going places” person than a “collecting things” person. But I think an early draft of a map or an early attempt at a clock that you could wear on your wrist would be amazing.

Writing Project Update

WORDS THIS WEEK: 1000. Illness, projects, what have you.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK'S ENTRY: 2.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Kelli, Kelli, Kelli, Ken, Ken, Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "Elaborate on the 'Turtle vs. Hitler's Skull' question; Briefly explain why you would rather display Hitler's Skull than keep a pet Turtle and what you find to be interesting about the idea of Hitler's Skull as an artifact. Then, pick an historical artifact that you would actually like to display in your living room without coercion and explain why."

The background, and the answer, appears shortly.

500 WORDS FINISHED BY: 4/16-17 midnight

Slaughterhouse 65

START TIME: 10:32 PM
END TIME: 11:33 PM
WORD COUNT: 525

“Write a diary entry.” –Ken Faikus

Dear Keyboard,

Today was full. There was no work of the occupational variety, which granted me one day where everybody could conceivably hate me behind my back without worrying about my potential appearance. There was a great deal to accomplish but there was no set time frame in which to accomplish it. I was awake early enough considering the lateness of the checkout time last night and I don’t think I slept late enough to inspire any resentment. I got the pictures done that I said I would do this morning and got those sent over after three tries. The camera saves the pictures with preposterously high detail and the SMTP servers for Google don’t allow this sort of foolishness.

Looking back on the day I think that I got everything done that I needed to. I remembered that I forgot the scotch tape when I was inadvertently reminded at 9:30 and I remembered that I forgot the maple syrup at 6 PM when I was on my way someplace else. I remembered to buy lucky cereal and I’m laughing sardonically at the last time that I had any of it, which now seems more than a million miles away.

I didn’t eat very well today but I ate sufficiently. I did work out for an hour, running a glacially slow three miles and doing an abdominal workout. I renewed for another year at the gym and gleefully noted that the charge for my membership comes to 50 cents a day.

I took [my girlfriend’s] bike to McGhies to get tuned up and prepared for her fitting on Monday afternoon. I said hello to old friends at the bike shop and caught them up on the lives of those around me that they knew about.

They still ask how Nannette’s doing; I mentioned she just moved back out west. She’s now done triathlon camps and is looking to race more seriously. [My ex-wife] is doing a triathlon. [My girlfriend] is doing a triathlon. All around me are people training, people getting faster, people thinking of what that first race is going to be like. The first race is one of those experiences I would gladly not do over again; the bottomless nerves, the swimming paranoia, the confusion, the endless obsessing over transition. Give me the cold dreary professionalism and thousand yard start of my third race in Chicago, or my third in San Diego, or the fourth Las Vegas Triathlon. Races where I could identify the climbs by where specific weeds were growing on the side of the road, where every speck of what I was feeling was already burned in my muscles from years prior. The first of anything is always the worst when you never know what to expect.

The kids are doing great and ate well, they found each other’s Easter eggs and helped out and had fun playing together. They fell asleep as quickly as I wanted to, but I had writing and such to take care of. There are things to do, people to meet, and places to be tomorrow. Today was pretty good and tomorrow will be even better.

Writing Project Update

WORDS THIS WEEK: 1000. Slight improvement but nothing spectacular. I'm starting to get a schedule down, now I just have to feel like writing a little more and make some progress. Events are overtaking introspection, and it's incredible to get to live life rather than just hear about it.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK'S ENTRY: 2.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 2 (Ken, Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "Write a diary entry."

Sure, why not. Plane leaves at midnight and the entry will be on it.

500 WORDS FINISHED BY: 4/9-10 midnight

Slaughterhouse 64

START TIME: 7:45 PM
END TIME: 9:20 PM
WORD COUNT: 646

Choose one place in the world you would most like to visit. Explain your choice in terms of the social history of any significant period that interests you. – Kelli George

I’ve been lucky enough to travel a few places, but if we’re going to throw time travel into the mix, I would like to visit Japan in the early 1990’s to follow the career of Chad Rowan, the Hawaiian-born sumo wrestler know as Akebono.

If you’ve never seen a sumo match, it’s essentially like watching trucks fight. In a society where men’s height rarely exceeds six feet tall, Akebono stood 6’8” and weighed 500 pounds. He had longer legs than most sumo wrestlers, and he had the record and the reputation to achieve sumo’s highest rank, yokozuna.

And here’s the conundrum. A wrestler promoted to yokozuna has a few more responsibilities than soda commercials and grocery store openings. Sumo is heavily associated with the Shinto religion, and was this something that could be bestowed upon a foreigner?

Another Hawaiian, Konishiki, ascended to ozeki, one step below yokozuna. In 1992, the chairman of the Yokozuna Deliberation Committee announced, “We wanted to make doubly sure that Konishiki is worthy of being a grand champion. Therefore, we decided to wait another tournament.” Konishiki was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “If I were Japanese, I would be yokozuna already.” Apologies were demanded and given. He never made yokozuna.

Meanwhile, Sadaharu Oh holds the Japanese baseball home run record of 55 in a single season. Three foreign players have come close to breaking the record – Randy Bass, Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes and Alex Cabrera – and each time that they faced an Oh-managed club late in the season, they were intentionally walked rather than given a chance at breaking the record. Bass was walked on four pitches in four at bats and would have been walked a fifth time had he not practically thrown the bat at an outside pitch and hit a flare into right field. The pitching coach of Oh’s team explained it would be “distasteful” for a foreign-born player to break the record.

Akebono became a Japanese citizen, renounced his American citizenship, converted to Shintoism, married a Japanese woman and followed every example and cleared every hurdle to become the first foreign-born yokozuna.

Something as trivial as wrestlers and baseball may not seem to present much in terms of social history. But sport can serve as a prism with which to view a nation as a whole, and try to remember the backdrop for this time period in Japanese and American relations. Toyota was dominating the auto industry and sending General Motors on the road to ruin (before the American mania for SUVs resurrected American manufacturers for a while). They had purchased Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center. China had yet to coalesce as an industrial center. The fearsome Other to the American manufacturing sector was the Japanese. The real estate bubble was in full roar in Japan and their economic “lost decade” was just starting to occur, and they didn’t know it. (Japanese financial firms gorged themselves on a combination of hyperinflated land prices and extremely cheap and easy credit, and when the prices of the assets collapsed several “zombie firms” were seen as too big to fail. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.)

So in a sport that was central to the American identity, Americans were not allowed to succeed so that the Japanese league could retain its cultural moorings, and in a sport central to the Japanese identity, an American broke through and succeeded (and ultimately led to limits on the number of foreign born sumo wrestlers allowed to participate in professional sumo in Japan). I thought that the contrast of a society devoted to exporting goods, having spent an overheated decade as an economic powerhouse, that was fighting to retain its national identity through sport would be an interesting thing to see, particularly with the foresight of knowing how fundamentally different Japan’s global footprint would be in only a few years.

Writing Project Update - Plea For Continuance

It works like this. You can have something really good on Sunday night - I assure you, the question is excellent - or you can have something awful that I only have 20 minutes for.

I thought so. See you Sunday night.

NEXT UPDATE DUE BY: 4/4-5 midnight

Slaughterhouse 63

START TIME: 9:35 PM
END TIME: 11:01 PM
WORD COUNT: 504

“You've been doing these for over a year now, so what have you learned? Where have you gotten better and what are still weaknesses?”

Taking a clear look at this project is hard for me to do, because I’ve tried to impose a discipline on myself that writing has never really required. I know that I can write SOMETHING that comes out around 500 words in about an hour or so, that it may be confusing, or hilarious, or occasionally incoherent.

The most interesting part of the exercise, other than the topics at hand, is the timeframe that I chose to do it. I picked Friday nights with a midnight deadline because, in all honesty, I’m usually up. But increasingly I find myself keeping those hours in a sort of twilight, half-asleep-but not-awake haze that leads to unfinished sentences, meandering topics, and tacked on addendums in a futile attempt to cross the word threshold. I look at the finished results on Facebook as well as the blog site, and usually I’m amused to find out that the words are all spelled correctly, but I’ve forgotten to finish a sentence or a paragraph.

Slaughterhouse is not good writing, but fast writing, the same way that fast neurosurgery may not necessarily be good neurosurgery. Everyone who sets eyeballs on this reinforces the idea that I should write some more. I know that I should be writing about the projects that I’ve been working on, but right now it’s not as if the rest of my life is running with Swiss-watch precision. My work days scurry into the hours on either side of them. Training is ever-present. We’re beset with clouds of mulberry pollen all over the valley. I’m driving all over and actually enjoying life as a participant and not a spectator.

Where I’ve gotten better is just writing what I want and letting it go; avoiding the temptation to go back and repair everything was not easy to arrive at, but once I forced myself to realize I had to let the stuff I was doing stand by itself as I was prizing speed over quality, it made the rest of it go a little bit quicker.

I think I’ve done a better job of picturing who the target reader is, and interestingly, it’s no one who’s probably heard most of the stories or comparisons before. Occasionally I feel like I’m writing to the questioner but that assumes we each know the back stories – usually true but irrelevant to most of the broader audience. I have had the distinct pleasure of having other people quote back the experiences that I’ve had (and forgotten that I had written about) to me as I was talking to them about other topics entirely. That was surreal.

Weaknesses still include my maddening inability to write a beginning, a middle, and an end, the fact that I juggle points around whether or not they’re germane to the subject, and that more than a few of these haven’t provided any enlightenment but have the grim feel of punching the clock. Granted, it’s designed to be a punishment, but the reader shouldn’t feel like it’s theirs.

Writing Project Update

WORDS WRITTEN THIS WEEK: 250. I haven't had time to touch anything project-related in a very long time.

RESPONSES TO LAST QUESTION: 1, correctly pointing out that I botched the syllable count in the third haiku.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Ken, Ken, and Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: You've been doing these for over a year now, so what have you learned? Where have you gotten better and what are still weaknesses?

500 WORDS DUE BY: Midnight 3/26-27

Slaughterhouse 62

START TIME: 9:24 PM
END TIME: 10:46 PM
WORD COUNT: 501 (Seriously, look it up. I’m exhausted, but it’s for real.)

“In the form of a poem with a clear rhyme scheme or a clear structure of syllabic count, what are your thoughts on the NCAA tournament?”

Pretty sure I’m now
Assured of complete failure
With 50 games left

My West regional
Hacked apart with a Ginsu
Chose Florida State

Must have thought it was
January, football
And puzzled seniors

Of course they could beat
The Syracuse Orangemen –
What have those guys done?

National number one?
I should be watching the games
Or maybe TV

Lost to Gonzaga
Popular in March, disappears
Just like St. Patrick

And whoa, look, Georgetown?
This was not the Ohio
I picked to beat you

John Thompson would have
Twisted open someone’s head
Like a coconut

What? His kid coaches?
Suppose next you’ll tell me that
Ewing’s kid plays too

(Wikipedia:
“Jim, if you were any less
Informed, you’d be dead.

“He was drafted by
The Kings, traded to Houston,
Then wound up in New York.

Played in the D-League,
Hurt his knee pretty badly,
Joining Jamaica.”

“Jamaica?” I thought.
“How the irie have fallen –
Dad started Dream Team.”

Then I realized
Being prone to distraction
Had several drawbacks.

I returned to the
Scene of withering collapse –
My erstwhile bracket.

Louisville got thumped
Which made my bracket entry
10 points less funny

The name that I chose
Was “Pitino’s Dine and Dash”
True schadenfreude

You’d think a wealthy
Motivational speaker
Won’t tryst on the floor

But apparently
He was overtaken by
Passion, not hygiene

Guess I picked Marquette
With the misguided belief
Dwyane Wade was still there

Somehow and some way
My Elite Eight selections
Are still quite intact

Picked Temple; looks like
Those numbskulls get drubbed by the
Ivy League Champions

They lost to Cornell!
The hotel management school!
They’d better walk home!

Notre Dame lost, and
Suddenly my smile brightens
With dark-hearted glee

If the football team
Joined the Big East Conference:
Pounded like cheap veal.

But in March Madness
You collect conference bucks.
Doesn’t work solo.

UNLV lost,
Newly minted Las Vegans
Act disappointed.

They miss the days of
Ol’ Jerry Tarkanian
When they weren’t from here.

“If a kid can’t read
And after 4 years, reads some,
You’ve done right by him.”

Are you thinking that
A true university
Should aspire to more?

You must be in league
With those racist jackals at
The NCAA.

The world got to see
How genuinely crazy
This place really is.

The courtside is still
Nicknamed “Gucci Row”
By the media

UNLV’s coach
Lon Kruger, fits in here like
Bacon with gum drops

The former coach was
Bill Bayno, who got
Caught with some hookers

I know! In VEGAS!
You’ve really got to wonder
“Wow, what are the odds?”

God knows where he’s at.
Wikipedia must know;
I could not care less.

The happy mistake
That would have let me win this;
It never happened.

If my picks were an
Expensive thoroughbred horse
They would have a limp

Got me an express
First Class ticket to Suckville
Population: Me


Clicking on “Word Count…”
Like a crack-addled mule deer;
Am I almost done?

But I finished this
Insane assignment in time;
Victory is mine!

Writing Project Update

WORDS WRITTEN THIS WEEK: 250. (Seriously? You mean it's already Friday?)

RESPONSES TO LAST QUESTION: 2, who interestingly each had different ideas of what the metaphors were. Were they right? Yes.

SUBMISSIONS THIS WEEK: 3 (Ken, Ken, and Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "In the form of a poem with a clear rhyme scheme or a clear structure of syllabic count, what are your thoughts on the NCAA tournament?"

Ye Gods. I've seen a grand total of eight minutes of basketball in the background all weekend. Let's give it a try.

500 WORDS DUE BY: Midnight 3/19-20

Slaughterhouse 61

START TIME: 9:45 PM
END TIME: 11:23 PM

"Describe an aspect of your life only using metaphors."

The metronome is ticking, ticking, ticking, and I’m losing myself in the rhythm. The notes are laid out in front of me and so much of this piece is committed to memory that I’m playing with something much deeper than fingers and ears and timing, but I’m going for precise, I’m not interested in playing just to hear it. I stopped having to actually play the piano to know what it sounded like many, many years ago. Maybe you can read the script from a movie and hear the actors saying the lines that you saw play out? That’s me. I can read the sheet music and hear the symphony. Look at the walls – I’ve been there and done that.

When a lot of people hear the piano, they can identify it as such. Everybody’s probably been near one or touched one and maybe learned a song or two. I did a little more – OK, a LOT more – than that, but I still need to practice. There’s an aspect of something more finite that someone who walked by the room right now would understand that I’m looking for. I want the piece to work completely, and there’s a spot over here that’s a little bit off. Something seems a little out of tune, the high E is a little too sharp, and the natural translation that I’m hoping for isn’t quite there.

Repetition, tuning, more tuning, more repetition.

The funny part about it is, I’m not that good of a piano player. Don’t get me wrong, I can play, and I can almost certainly play better than you. But the end result of all of this piano, night after night, day after day, is it’s hard for me to just sort of lose myself in what it sounds like to play for the hell of it. A lot of times it isn’t fun because I’m searching for those minutiae, the difference between me and some of the greatest pianists in the world. I’m listening for fluidity. I’m listening for how it will fit together with the orchestra. Right there is where the bass player comes in. Here’s where the drummer will do the fill with the cymbal.

But I can still let it go, and I still love it, and when it all sets up and I get something to feel the way that I want it, everything all lined up and straight and smooth and precise – I love it even more, and I know enough to appreciate it. What I’ve never understood, though, is the assumption that if I walk into someone else’s house, and there’s a piano there, that I couldn’t possibly want to play it because it isn’t a concert grand in a room with session musicians. If I didn’t love the sound of it I’d never have wound up in that room with those session musicians. I can play just to play, without flourish, without showing off, without a care in the world. It’s still fun. If it stopped being fun, I’d worry.

Writing Project Update

Words written this week: Very, very few. I was busy getting my head shaved and working like a crack-addled lab rat. It simply wasn't happening.

Last Week's Responses: One.

This week's questions: 4 (Ken, Ken, Ken, and Anonymous)

This week's question: "Describe an aspect of your life only using metaphors."

Does an allegory count? I'll have to look it up. We'll be wrapped up at midnight.

RESPONSE DUE BY: 3/12-13 midnight

Writing Project Update

I just got home from work and Slaughterhouse won't be done in three minutes, so I'm taking the night off. I'll write Sunday if the chance arises. Thanks for your patience.

Slaughterhouse 60

START TIME: 9:37 PM
END TIME: 10:19 PM
WORD COUNT: 617

“Please give your personal application of "zeitgeist" to your last essay and include your view from your position on your space time continuum; also consider others younger and older.”

Now, what I was talking about in the first essay was the importance of attempting to participate in content or activities that were outside of someone’s defined comfort zone, because of the danger of living in a self-selected realm of knowledge. If you never make any effort to have your assumptions questioned, you’ll have no idea if you’re right.

Now the self-selected realm of knowledge that I’m picking from is a diverse range of opinion, because that’s important to me; I’m almost certainly reading someone’s work who you absolutely can’t stand, because part of why I’m reading them is to know why I disagree with them. I know that if I threw up my hands and dismissed every single person who disagreed with me as “haters,” that certainly doesn’t infer that I’m making a particularly persuasive argument. Unfortunately most of politics is currently conducted in this fashion.

From a cultural or music perspective, I’m at an age where I am simply no longer the target consumer. The people who buy music by the truckload, like I used to, Maybe you had to listen to a song by Beyonce that had nine writers and six words in it, but I actually know why I hate it because I tried so hard to get through it and couldn’t. I don’t really need to force myself to listen to anything new musically, because the audience is so fragmented that every radio station only plays the same 10-15 songs between the same 7-8 commercials. My sister and my younger coworkers have a much greater grasp on the cultural and music zeitgeist than I do; they’re around younger people, they see more movies, they have the pace and energy to worry about those sorts of things. I hope to God that there aren’t a lot of Us Weekly junkies over at the Strategic Air Command, but I think I know better.

And with where I’m at in my life – single, two kids, busy, self involved hobbies and interests – that’s why I’m not that immersed in it. I’m even a part of the growing number of Americans who don’t watch very much television, so all those big, collective moments that seem to happen every late spring that involve the disappearance of a beloved network television show that less than a few million people watch, I miss out on what all the fuss is about. I mean, were there people who missed any of those benchmark departure shows – Cheers, Seinfeld, Sopranos, Everybody Loves Raymond – who won’t have the opportunity to watch syndicated reruns or boxed episodes of the DVDs until the end of time if that’s what they so chose? Somewhere right now, a cable television station is showing a “Seinfeld” rerun.

I imagine when I was younger it was more important because it was a link to the rest of the world, and when I’m older I’ll be able to view current events against the perspective of more personal background and history. How much more fragmented things can get and retain a perspective that encompasses a collective zeitgeist, I’m not sure. If you think of something like Facebook, where the first page for everyone consists entirely of news from their friends, and the option exists to block news that you do not want to hear. (Since this usually relates to simulated criminology and agriculture, all is not lost.) The journey has been interesting, but the path ahead is murky. It’ll be intriguing to see where it goes.

Writing Project Update

Writing Project Update

Words this week: Less than 500. I did a lot of video work for Space Monkeys promotion this week (the results of which you can see splattered across my friends' and my Facebook pages) and worked late on a number of occasions. Rest assure that everything's falling by the wayside pretty much equally, not merely the writing.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK: 5 - and you wouldn't believe this, but my office found it rather popular.

QUESTIONS THIS WEEK: There were 3, but this week's winner is Jay Lyden, who contributed the largest individual donation to the Space Monkeys and the St. Baldrick's Foundation. You can follow his example and get us closer to our goal by donating at https://www.stbaldricks.org/teams/spacemonkeys . Thank you!

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: Please give your personal application of "zeitgeist" to your last essay and include your view from your position on your space time continuum; also consider others younger and older.

I'll try not to meander, but I think I have an idea.

RESPONSE DUE BY: 2/26-27 midnight

Slaughterhouse 59

Slaughterhouse 59
START TIME: 10:33 PM
END TIME: 11:32 PM
WORD COUNT: 738

"Write a scene as though your life were a sitcom."

INTERIOR

A set of half-wall cubicles in a very grimy basement, with four desks being shown.

At a desk in the back corner, a shorter Asian gentleman is staring closely at a too-small computer monitor, tapping his right foot obsessively and singing along with the radio. His desk is meticulously neat, pencils organized, and he’s wearing a suit.

In the opposite corner is a woman with stacks of magazines lining several bookshelves, four framed pictures of different cats (one of them showing an article surrounding it that makes it apparent it was cut out of a magazine, minimizing the possibility that she actually owns the cat in question), and multiple tins of cat food.

Toward the forefront, staring straight up, is a heavyset gentleman with a shaved head. He is staring at the ceiling at first glance. A second glance proves he is asleep. A quick listen reveals he is snoring.

A twitchy, loud guy in a sports coat with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder strides through the glass door on the left, past a paper sign that indicates the door must stay closed. Four months ago he replaced the paper sign with a mirror image of the words on the sign showing through the other side of the glass, as if the letters had suddenly decided to turn around and face the other direction. No one has noticed.

TWITCH (into cell phone) Loved? Adored? Popular? You’ve got to be out of your mind. We’ll be lucky if they don’t want to shoot us. I know right now what my day’s gonna be. I’m going to walk into this meeting and the only thing that I’m going to come away with, after an hour and a half, is that when I walked in the door downstairs, the security guard at the desk didn’t take the snap off of his holster. That’s the ONLY thing that might go right. It’s all our fault. That’s why we’re here.

Twitch sits down at his desk, grabs an orange gumball from a jar on his desk, mimes dribbling it twice, and throws it at the heavyset gentleman’s mouth. It bounces off of his eye, startling him awake.

HEAVY: What the hel….lo, Mr. Happiness.

A shot of the floor reveals nine other gumballs scattered about.

TWITCH puts on a phone headset and covers his left ear. He is still talking on the phone as he’s doing this.

TWITCH: Look, if they actually LIKED everything we did, if they were so happy with the course of their day that they sent us cards and pizzas and nice little notes that said we were good to them? You know what that would mean? It would mean that when they ruined everything, when they lost the file they were working on, when they caught the virus, when they moved a whole mess of folders around on a group drive for no reason at all, they couldn’t blame us and they would actually OWN UP to the fact it was THEIR fault. They’d have to go home and look in the mirror at night and splash a glass of cold water on their face, and say, “You know what? The computer works fine. I’m the one who ruined it. I have an easy job. I don’t mine coal or unload cargo ships. I’m not a landscaper working in 110 degrees. All I do is push some buttons so that other people don’t have to. That’s all. And I suck at it.” You think that’s going to happen? You think anyone’s going home tonight and saying, ‘Wow, Thank Christ for IT, otherwise I’d be looking for paper files in a cabinet for about a week instead of pushing a couple buttons.’ Trust me, our only hope is that we stay right where we are at the moment – a cab ride away from the overwhelming desire to take our own life. I gotta run. I’ll talk to you in a bit.

MAGAZINE LADY (reading from screen) Wow. Guess who died.

No one responds.

CORNER SINGER: (singing) “I thought I knew what love was/What did I know/Close pays car lawn for Trevor/Pie wood bust get ‘em snow”

TWITCH stares at him with his mouth agape and adjusts the volume in his headset. He looks at a large digital clock next to his monitor, which reads 7:02.

TWITCH (to himself): 30 more years of this and I can retire.

Writing Project Update

Words this week: 650. Nothing on the projects. I may need to start setting the bar a little higher, because I feel like I haven't had much time for anything.

Responses to last week: Two.

Questions this week: 3. (Ken, Ken, Ken)

Third question this week: "Write a scene as though your life were a sitcom."

Looking up, staring at the ceiling, wondering what I have done to deserve this.

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE RECENTLY COME ON BOARD

I started cross-posting these to my Facebook page a few months after I started it, and Facebook is where most people wind up reading it. For New Year's of 2009, I made a resolution that I was going to write 4000 words per week toward one of three writing projects: a memoir, a diet and fitness book, and a roman a clef about some of the more colorful aspects of a previous career. (I did make a good bit of progress on each.) If I didn't hit this word target of about 12-15 pages per week, I would write 500 words on Friday night, at random, on any topic that anyone wished. What I wanted to ensure is that I never stopped writing for longer than a few days at a time. I had a blog that was set up at jameslyden.blogspot.com, officially titled "Working Out The Bugs," a place where I could write something for an audience with no expectations of readership.

To ensure the randomness, I set up an email address at slaughterhouse@jameslyden.com. The mailbox automatically populates from my ISP when I push a button; I don't give myself a chance to study ahead, so the earliest that I know what's coming is usually Thursday afternoon. I don't start writing until 9 PM Friday night, and I have to have the whole thing finished by midnight. And whether I like it or I hate it, it goes up. I welcome and encourage feedback - you can do so publicly on FB through the comments or through email, and while I won't publish what other people write to me privately I post a count of how many people told me what they thought.

There really are no rules. Topics can be resubmitted over and over again; I will answer absolutely anything (because if I wanted to duck something I should have met my word target during the week) and if I quote something at length it doesn't count towards the word count - I have to write the 500 words myself. I may go back and correct spelling errors or if I left a sentence unfinished (sometimes I skip around) but I don't make structural changes or edits. They're designed to be dashed off, work quick, grind it out and let it rock.

I do try to write no matter the circumstances, but I have given myself a night off here and there, usually during my racing season. I've posted book excerpts and older material here some nights when there aren't enough questions or when I just know I'm not in the kind of shape to look at a screen for a few hours. I've put stuff together on my Blackberry while sitting in a laundry room or on a laptop in a hotel somewhere. It's part of the rhythm of my weekend and I have a lot of fun doing it. I don't know if it's made me a better writer, but I do know how to get just enough of an idea in place.

Thank you for reading, for contributing, for telling me it's awful or that it made you laugh. And one more thing...

THE 2ND ANNUAL ST. BALDRICK'S SLAUGHTERHOUSE AUCTION

Once again this year, rather than subjecting yourself to the cruel randomness that is the Inbox chopping block, you can buy your way to the front of the line. The largest individual donor to my page or to Team Space Monkeys by February 25 for the St. Baldrick's Foundation gets to choose next week's topic. Regardless of whether or not you want to win fabulous prizes, I'm shaving my head to raise money for juvenile cancer research. I would appreciate your donating to our cause here:

http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/jameslyden

Thanks for your help!

RESPONSE DUE BY: 2/19-20 midnight

Slaughterhouse 58

Slaughterhouse 58
START TIME: 10:26 PM
END TIME: 11:37 PM
WORD COUNT: 1096

You’ve reference Gu Gel a number of times. Performance enhancing everything has been in the news lately. What are the least natural occurring substances you put in your body/ingest on a regular basis? What’s your philosophy on man made chemicals?

(Your narrator grins broadly, and several people who learned long ago to stop asking “Why do your hands always shake like that?” glance down and sigh.)

I’m generally healthy. By the standards of the United States, I’m about the average of the bell curve when it comes to body mass, maybe I’m on the sweeter side of the needle when it comes to endurance, and I know that I have a very high tolerance for pain. (This became evident this week, when a doctor said that I had shimmied right past a common cold into bronchitis and a sinus infection. Apparently I’d been wandering around with an ordinary cold for a while and it wasn’t until it mutated into something a little zippier that I had to stand up (or, in my case, fall asleep) and take notice.

My philosophy on man-made chemicals is, I’m all for them. Man made chemicals began when somebody mixed some grapes with some yeast and realized that the result could knock you on your ass. I’m a fan of alcohol (particularly when I’ve been prevented from having any for a week because I’m tanked up on antibiotics) and its ability to erase the interminable span of time between evening and the next morning. I remember the Cheesecake Factory, across from the Ritz, had a drink on the menu called the “Twilight Zone” which was “double everything and fruit juice.” The bartender knew the reason I was there was I’d just cranked out some upgrade work at the hotel across the street, was still jacked on the raw terror of a high-wire database maneuver that could have thrown the place into chaos but had gone off without a hitch, and it was 1 AM and I needed all that adrenaline to disappear. The first was always like playing Where’s Waldo – is that 151? I think it’s 151! – and the second was always the one that would get me to sleep as long as I could cross the street and ride the elevator. But me and booze is an entirely different subject. (And here’s where I should mention I’ve never taken illegal drugs of any kind. Street pharmacology frightens me.)

The chemicals that Beth is referring to aren’t the stuff that’s sold off of backlit shelves, but by places that are ostensibly interested in my good health. I’ve found over the years that your body is your own laboratory, and you’ll never know quite how far you can push yourself until you try. The problem is the advice is always from someone who’s selling something, who’s bashing something, who’s really trying to get you to do something else entirely – and I hate it. You will not find anything more dangerous to your health than Redline, a powerful caffeine-based stimulant that has the world’s most comical warning label on it, including “The consumer assumes total liability if product is used in a manner inconsistent with its labeling” and they point out that there are two servings in a little blue bottle the size of a can of Red Bull. (Which tastes like yellow Triaminic. This stuff tastes like Children’s Tylenol.) There’s stuff hiding out in there that they barely have names for, and next to the US Recommended Daily Allowance there’s a little cross, because the boys at the lab haven’t figured out how much “vinpocetine” the human body needs in a day. They also say “Do not use this product if you are more than 20 pounds overweight” and have the slogan “Feel the freak/Feel the freeze/Watch the fat burn off with ease!” So a little bit of a mixed message, sure. But it has no calories. It has no sugar. They don’t even bother trying to pretend there’s natural flavors in it. It’s all lightning, and if you go for a run ten minutes after drinking one you’ll feel like something out of “The Matrix.” It’s wonderful.

This is the far outlier of anything I’m willing to put in my body, even further out there than the vitamins (my standard non-event day breakfast is a lot of vitamins and cold black coffee, no room no cream no sugar) and I, who can normally knock down espressos at 9 at night and sleep like a coma victim at 11, won’t drink any of it after 3 PM.

But aren’t there consequences? Aren’t you afraid?

Sure I am. I get my blood pressure checked when I visit the doctor and when I donate blood, along with cholesterol, and even just this past week I walked in dead sick and got 120/67. I can hear the people who (rightfully) point out that I don’t eat enough and I don’t sleep enough and it’s all going to come to a very bad end if I don’t knock it off with some of this foolishness and learn to pace myself like a normal human being. And I’d be more afraid of using this stuff when I was starting out and my heart rate monitor would occasionally show “200” than I would be now.

In terms of performance enhancement, I don’t use the stuff during a competition because it makes me too nervous. Gu’s a meal replacement – coffee and a piece of danish after a long night, making sure all of my blood sugar doesn’t crater and leave me a blubbering, Julie Moss-like mess after a carbohydrate bonk. Seeing as donuts would do a number on my stomach and the coffee wouldn’t be worth tasting again, the Gu does what I want. And nothing that I take is on the World Anti-Doping Association’s list of banned substances, so I’m in the clear in that regard, though I may need to look up this inhaler and nose spray they prescribed me this week.

I spend a lot of races alongside bodies a lot sleeker than mine, a lot faster than mine, that are in better aesthetic shape than me. I see bicycles that cost four times as much as mine and I see men with shaved legs and skinsuits. I nod to myself and think, “Better to work on the engine before the paint or the tires.” Yes, some of the fuel that I take isn’t the smartest thing to be doing. It’s the one area where I’m probably less cautious than I should be. But at the bleeding edge of success, there’s always a willingness to push yourself a little further than I think is reasonable, to know that I’ve hovered out over the edge of the cliff like Wile E. Coyote and been able to scramble back.

Writing Project Update

Words this week: Around 3500. I wrote about work and I wrote about the Wagerfecta and I finessed and bent the world to my will and I wrote about the Space Monkeys and I wrote some cool stuff you won't see and I got bronchitis and a sinus infection and I slept a lot when I wasn't writing.

RESPONSES TO LAST WEEK: 2. Thanks - I hated it, it was lazy and cheap and tossed-off and it actually posted with a clause just hanging out there, like Ron White talking about Lug Nut Day. I also can't break down my entire belief structure in 500 or 5000 words. It's tricky.

QUESTIONS THIS WEEK: 6 (Beth, Beth, Beth, Ken, Ken, Ken)

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "You’ve referenced Gu Gel a number of times. Performance enhancing everything has been in the news lately. What are the least natural occurring substances you put in your body/ingest on a regular basis? What’s your philosophy on man made chemicals?"

Heh-heh-heh. Oh, this will be fun. Catch you in a bit.

RESPONSE DUE BY: 2/12-13 midnight