New Short Story

Hey all. My short story, "Crossover," is out today in Angel City Review. Here's how it opens:

Nobody beat Ancient Jay to the court on Saturday. Billy knew this was true. He’d tried four times, once setting his alarm so he could get there before the sun came up over the houses on the hills that horseshoed Glen Park. It didn’t matter. Jay was there first.

Ancient Jay wasn’t really ancient. Probably late-thirties, forty tops. People called him ancient because he’d been playing pick up ball at the Glen longer than anyone else and because of his face. His sun-browned skin was creased like moist smoked jerky. Worse was the way Jay sweated. His pores were like little mouths drooling salty ooze that dribbled more than dripped. They never played shirts and skins and most guys called it the Jay Rule to his face. But Ancient Jay was a part of the park, constant like the swing set or sandbox or cement path winding through the two acres of grass and trees that smelled like pine and Pacific when the breeze blew through from the beach just across the Coast Highway. So the stories grew up around him. Billy knew the morning Jay wasn’t there would feel like someone took down the monkey bars and left up the slide....

You can find the rest of the story, and all of the stellar work in the winter edition of Angel City Review free at http://angelcityreview.com/.

A Roadmap or a Vacuum

I teach writing. Even when I'm teaching literature, I'm teaching how it was written as a way of seeing why it matters. Words matter to me, because they're never—never—just words.

A simple message of hearing and speaking critically is this: never view rhetoric as empty. How people argue their point is never merely an intellectual construct. It's a roadmap or it's a vacuum.

When you line up what people believe with why they believe it, you get one of those two possibilities in terms of how you can assess where their thinking will take them. Remember, words are never just words.

In some cases, you can see how an argument will play out in action. The sources and, often, the fallacies an arguer draws on to claim authority carry in them behaviors and message shapes the careful listener will find instructive in anticipating where this will go.

Hence: roadmap.

Example: Your friend tells you about a time a person of differing political views tore up a political sign they had posted in their yard. Your friend then points you to four separate Facebook posts describing similar behavior from "the same type" of people and, without pause, uses that in addition to their own experience to characterize all people they suspect as holding even similar political leanings as (fill in the negative characterization most employed by your friends/family/neighbors).

This, as we say in the business, is a fallacious two-fer. The first is the logical mistake of extending one's own personal experience too broadly in relation to the complexity and diversity of experiences found even in the limited world of yard sign destruction. Your friend's story becomes broad proof of their own feelings about "those people."

But everyone, even the most stubborn individualists, know their story isn't enough. Thus the second fallacy—a carefully cultivated mechanism for bias confirmation—becomes important. By linking to a few other friendly examples/perspectives, their own assertions are validated exponentially (in their heads, anyway). And that gives the confidence in their sweeping (and almost always wrong) generalizations-as-facts views.

And this becomes your map. This person will make their own opinions a truth stretched across an issue and act accordingly. It doesn't always tell you what they will do, merely how they will justify themselves after the fact (and yes, that is as scary to type as it is to consider in practice).

But a map is always better than the other option: the vacuum.

Taking the same sign vandalism, the vacuum rhetorician tells you the story and says, "That was wrong, the people who did it are bad, and I will never trust them again." And that's it; they've built a solid wall of certainty you can't see through to their reasoning.

These are not logical structures, they are the results of submerged processes that could hinge on all forms of fallacy or irrationality or even deep bias. But who knows, because this is the rhetorical equivalent of a kid responding to a math problem without showing his work. Right or wrong, you have no idea how that kid ended up where he did.

That's the vacuum. In terms of a math problem, it's confusing and counterproductive. In terms of the sign vandalism, it's problematic.

In terms of where we are in America today, it's terrifying.

Post-Election Conversations…

Photo Credit: presbylutheranism.com

A follow up on yesterday’s post. You can find it here.

I went to bed last night knowing that my son’s fears had been realized in the election, and also that he didn’t know yet. I found him sleeping in our room again because of his agitation.

I didn’t sleep well, and then my alarm went off. He wasn’t even fully awake when he asked:

“Who won, Dad?”

A note before pushing on: this isn’t likely to go where you think it will.

I answered honestly and held him as he tried to figure out—out loud—what it means now that what he was afraid of is real. I did the same with all three of my kids. It was a tough morning.

Here’s what we have decided so far. This election is over, but its challenge is not. What has been exposed by the process is ugly, but ugly has always been with us. And there is no option of checking out as if we bear no role in responding to what we see.

So we will:

• choose hope over despair;

• look for those who are hurting or afraid and respond with love;

• listen to what to the words and stories of those who are usually silenced;

• speak truth into the vacuum of bias and division we live in;

• refuse to limit who we are because of who others want us to be;

• and refuse to allow injustice to pass in silence.

If there is a mandate in this election, it’s that this country needs to find its heart. If we do, we need to use it rather than guard it. Ours is the sin of believing the world can only be only right when it resembles our version of how it should be. The suffering that myopia causes and has caused is enormous.

I’m looking to atone out loud for the sake of my kids and my country.

Post Script: Two incidents of note happened after I finished writing this that I think speak to what I’m working on here.

First, when dropping my sons off at school this morning, my parting words were, “Choose hope and look for people who need help.” As they walked away, another parent pulled into the loading zone and as his kid got out I heard, “You tell people how wrong they were and how Donald Trump made those idiots see.” They both laughed.

And second, I’ve already heard from six students trying to figure out how to understand their world in light of this paradigm shift. All have been openly harassed this election season for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

If you have said, “Make America Great Again” at any point, start by fixing these.

An Election's Eve Note...

I shouldn’t be writing this. I have other things to do. And yet…

…last night I walked into my bedroom to go to sleep and found my son curled up on the floor next to our bed. On our covers, he’d left a note.

“Please don’t move me….I’m worried about what will happen tomorrow.”

That’s not the whole thing. You don’t need the rest of his fears about today’s election.

You need to think about the role you’ve played in them.

My boy is nine and deeply empathetic. He gets it from his mother. His antennae are more sensitive than most, his words incapable of capturing yet what he’s picking up. But he’s catching our transmissions. And he’s drowning in what we all know about these politics as unusual.

We’re not ok. We should be worried. And we should be better.

The characters we should be impugning are our own. The values we should most fear have been on full display. And the fear in my son’s note is right now our legacy.

I’m old enough to know our country will move on after the votes are counted and that the terrifying shit show we need to address as a culture began well before the clowns took over this particular rodeo.

But what I think my son in most scared of is the conclusion I’ve come to at the end this long national failure of character.

We lack empathy. All of us. We can’t see each other.

How many think pieces on racism, classism, sexism, partisan-ism, and dogma do we need to see we’re growing increasingly blinding to who we’ve become?

How many polls results do we need to see the grand canyons we’ve so willing dug between ourselves?

I wish I felt more hopeful today, had some semblance of civic pride. History will be made one way or the other. But no candidate can step into the void we’ve created inside ourselves. No law will begin the hard, generations-long work needed to draw us together in ways we’ve only ever experienced in faulty rhetoric and nostalgia.

And no amount of worry on our part will fix this either. Worry is why we’re here in the first place. Worry about ourselves, our needs, our wants, our place. We won’t share because we’re convinced only we can see the world and what it needs clearly.

Clearly, we cannot.

Consider my son as I have: one small canary in a coal mine we should have abandoned long ago.

Go ahead and vote your conscience. But make sure you’ve found it first.

My interview with Ryan Gattis via the 1888 Center podcast, The How The Why

New Today: The 1888 Center's podcast, The How The Why, has posted my spring interview with Ryan Gattis regarding his novel All Involved. In it, we talk creativity, L.A. fiction, community, and maybe the Donut Man. Give it a listen here.

writing difficulties...

An observation:

Writers make difficulty by design. At least, the ones who make the most sense to me.

An explanation:

Writers, it seems, must find complications in life in places they could, ultimately, ignore if they weren’t cultivating a sense of struggle. Some might call this a pose, an air, a mantle tossed over their shoulders to approximate weight they don’t always actually carry. To be sure, writing is to accept a very privileged position in culture: an intersection of time, affluence, attention, and the assumption people need and want the results of those three things. Toward that end, they complicate living.

A (personal) metaphor:

This posture is faintly akin—metaphorically, of course—to the act of cutting, though not as externally damaging. Life is not controllable, and those things I actually cannot control are much scarier than the affectations that accumulate in my collection of what makes me “difficult.” Small phrases like incisions applied with precise control dissipate my unimpeachable sense of being unable to stop the world’s spin when chaos threatens to swallow me.

An amplification:

The world screams for our attention, to grab us by the ears and eyes and skin and impose itself. It seethes through broken teeth curses in broken children sold to satiate its anger; in hate masked as “common sense” and “heritage;” in losses made invisible by the uniquely human desire to turn away in order to protect our comfort.

A diagnosis:

However, good writers—by nature and by nurture of difficulty—cannot turn away. They need not even see the whole picture in order to extrapolate out the worst of cases in the best of circumstances, but they keep looking anyway. It’s their gift, if one can call it that. More, it is their responsibility.

A prognosis:

The cost of that privilege is so often a writer’s self-imposed debt.

I write because maybe.

“Why write? As soon ask, why rivet? Because a number of personal accidents drifts us toward the occupation of riveter, which preexists, and, most importantly, the riveting gun exists, and we love it." —John Updike, "Why Write?"

Why a person writes is something they should consider and, ironically, write about. Every so often, we need to remind ourselves why we need to string our words and dreams into something more.

This is an exercise I have all my students take part in, and, I guess, something I haven't done in a while. You can see my last attempt here. So here's my current answer to the question we all need to answer: Why, with all the other options we have, write?

I write because I breathe. When I breathe, I exist. When I exist, I understand that others exist. And when I understand others exist, I want to know them.

Or, maybe, I write because I can't know them. Not in a way I want to. Not in a way that moves beyond limited interaction. Not in a way that makes them real.

Or, maybe, I write because real is so illusory. It shifts at the exact moment I reach out to grab it. At just the moment I see it clearly. At just the second I've chosen the right words.

Or, maybe, I write because it really isn't a choice. Words are compulsion. Words are affliction. Words are skin, once torn, growing slowly back together.

Or, maybe, I write because living is the wound and stories my salve. My bandages. My scabs before scars destined to be their own stories.

Or, maybe, I write because my scars are not enough. They are just my own. They are just my sins. They are just my fault.

Or, maybe, I write because my faults are not their faults, but their faults make me human when I hold them next to mine. They make me aware of my imperfections. Aware of their human character. Aware of the fact that our humanity is bound up in these.

Or, maybe, I write because humanity is lost on humans until we arrest it in the amber of words. Grab it with the swipes of my pen, the strike of my fingers against the keys, the frozen flat surface of the printed page that captures my heart in ink.

Or, maybe, I write because that capture is the only real metaphor for freedom we have. Illogic as sense. Impossible as practical. Walls as open windows.

Or, maybe, I write on the very walls I want nothing more than to transcend. Maybe those words are my climb. My scale. My ascent.

Or, maybe, I write because there is nothing left to ascend save the holy moment of knowing my unknowing at the moment it ceases to lead only to the unknown. Doubt transubstantiated. Fear crucified. Hope resurrected.

Or, maybe, I write for precisely that maybe. That open question. That expansive possibility. That known unknown.

I write because maybe. Maybe.

until we are all free...

A note on this post: the content of my thoughts in this post comes in response to the wisdom of the people of color in my life (a group that includes people I’ve never met, but whose work in writing their experiences and perspectives has broadened my notion of everything). Nothing I’m saying here hasn’t been expressed by others. I am indebted to their contributions, as I would not see the water we swim in as clearly without their help. This is merely a space for me distill some of my own thoughts on the matter. I hope they challenge you as they do me.

As a parent, some of my most difficult conversations revolve around trying to help my daughter find her place in this world. Case in point: our recent discussion about how the Constitution was not written with her in mind at all.

My daughter is a young black woman, which is a precarious position in our society. As she becomes more aware of the history of her adopted country, she has to come to terms with something I never will. At the inception of America, in its most prized and lauded documents, she was invisible.

Because she is black, she was not afforded full personhood. Because she is a woman, she was even further erased. This is the reality of our nation’s origin story.

Unfortunately, that reality is not merely an artifact of the past. In many ways, my daughter, radiant as she is, must still fight to be visible like most women of color. And that fight, as she is learning from the cycle of violence that plays in our nation on repeat, is not merely rhetorical.

To live in America is to live in a tension between the idealized and never achieving that ideal. It always has been. For some, that tension is intellectual, a form of disappointment that things aren’t “the way they should be.” For others, however, the cost of being caught between the dream of American possibility and the reality of its brokenness is violence, fear, and, in too many cases, death. This, as much as anything else, marks what we now commonly describe as privilege.

The divide between these two cultural experiences is that we live with a nostalgia for something that never existed, a type of historical storytelling that has often been a form of violence employed for the sake of preserving one group’s sense of itself at the expense of—and often through the complete erasure of—another group: their identity, their agency, and their lives.

Do you ever wonder why a criminal of color is so easily cast as representative of his entire racial or ethnic or religious category while a white man who commits the same crime is solely responsible for his actions? Do you ever wonder why you never wonder that? Again, this is what people mean when they ask you to check your privilege.

An example: the political slogan “Make America Great Again.” To adhere to this notion, that there is a historically better America to return to if we just try hard enough, is not new. The current candidate slapping the phrase on ugly hats did not originate the idea.

It’s always been with us; the elusive sense that returning to a simpler time would soothe today’s troubles, would save us. It’s why so many movies in the 80’s sought solace in taking us back to the 50’s.

But this is only a solution if your proximity to the Great American Tension allows you to see that earlier time as safe. As my pastor, a black man, put it, “What part of the past do I want to go back to? When was it better here for me?”

Again, if this perspective has never occurred to you, yours is merely an intellectual tension. If you don’t look at our history and recoil at the very real danger of the internment camp, the lynching tree, or the reservation, you long for a time that only more fully and openly privileged a very small group of people: a group you may not have been a part of even as you imagine yourself being so.

This is my problem with people who default to the unflinching rhetoric of valorizing without any criticality the work of the American Founders. Yes, they wrote documents laden with immense potential to liberate humans and create space for equality that has never really existed.

And yet, they lived lives that directly undercut the potential of their words and blocked the path to the very equality they championed for so many people in this country. In essence, they proved that even implements designed to heal and empower become weapons when they are applied selectively to benefit only those we most resemble.

And to create these benefits, we have kept them from others time and time again, right down to our three most cherished freedoms: the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and, in far too many violent instances, life itself.

This is why “I can’t breathe” are not merely a man’s dying words. This is why we should not fall victim to the pandering sentiment of “Make America Great Again.” And this is why we should never say #AllLivesMatter, because we don’t live that way enough yet to claim it as our aspiration.

Instead of nostalgia, which has literally killed people, we need hard reality, honesty that does not flinch or recast the world in ways that make us feel better about ourselves, justice that is not selectively employed, mercy for those who are begging for us to acknowledge their suffering, and an actual attempt to hear each other in the midst of pain that renders us deaf.

I actually believe in the potential of the principles our country was founded on. If applied to everyone in equal measure, this would truly be the great place we imagine it to be.

But that’s not our reality and will not be until we do what neither the Founders, nor any generation since, could: value equally the humanity of everyone and admit that we are part of the blindness keeping us from doing so. This is the American greatness I want my daughter to experience.

Word G(r)ift

I had to drop some books off in my office* the other day, an occupational hazard of the job. Books find me, I swear, I don’t go looking.**

I had no intention of staying in my office any longer than necessary because that’s how work you weren’t planning on doing attaches itself to you. But as I turned to go, I noticed an older looking book I didn’t recognize sitting in the center of my desk.***

Upon closer inspection, the cover read Standard College Dictionary with the name “James Hedges” pressed into the lower right hand corner. This was odd. Dr. Hedges was the chair of the English department I now teach in when I was an undergrad, but he retired well before I was hired back as a professor.****

Side note: The at that point unknown gift giver had no way of realizing how appropriate his gift was. When I was six, I went on vacation with three books: an Archie comics collection, The Black Stallion, and Webster’s English Dictionary. I read every word in that dictionary before we got home. My family still finds that funny.

Flipping the book open, I found a letter tucked inside. In short, another former professor and now retiring colleague from the Communication Department, Dr. Ray McCormick, was leaving me the dictionary as Dr. Hedges had given it to him when he retired.

The note is simple and, in McCormick fashion, devoid of unnecessary emotion. As my rhetoric instructor, he emphasized that while form is message, our message must be true and useful. These were our guidelines. And yet…I can’t help being moved by his last line.

“On your retirement, pass it along to the next guy!”

There’s a certain sense of validation in the assumption that I’ll make it to retirement in this field. On the surface, it’s a small note to be sure. But Ray knows me; the confidence written into that line matters to me, as do the other votes of confidence I have received from time to time from former professors-turned-peers.*****

They remind me to look for ways I can call out talent and potential in my students. One day, I’ll likely be handing one of them that old dictionary with my own note in it.

Notes:

* I still find it immeasurably weird that I have a job that provides me an office to go to, which makes the gift I found on my desk even more touching.

** That is a categorical lie. I’m always stopping myself from buying books.

*** Which did not automatically mean I had not put said book there, merely that I could not remember doing so. As it turned out this time, though, I had not.

**** This turn of events monumentally more surprising than the whole having an office deal.

***** One of the gifts and oddities of working at the school you graduated from…

Things undone

Discoveries like this one have a way of moving me in two directions at once: back in time and deeper in the present moment. This truck makes me think of what I've never finished and, if I'm honest, what I might never. 

When I was a freshman in college, my dad found a 1946 Ford pickup much like the one in this picture. I noticed this one on my morning walk, a practice that has inclined me toward my age in ways I had yet to discover. I walk in the five o'clock hour of the morning as the sun comes up with the acid in my stomach for most of the first couple miles because I hate early mornings. But I hate how sedentary I have become more. So I walk.

There are many benefits to this choice I've made to get moving before most of the LA traffic and people in the sleepy suburb we live in (I tell myself). I'm done before my kids get up for school. I'm guaranteed to accomplish something with my day (a feeling writing has not provided me for a long time). And I am awake enough to have lucid conversations with my family before the weight of my daily schedule renders me monosyllabic. And most important, the walks force me to slow down and contemplate what I would otherwise push right past toward the goal of completing a regular workout.

Who's got next? Pretty sure it's Amish rules on this court.

Like that truck, I end up finding small pieces of the neighborhood that make me smile pretty regularly. For example, this random basketball hoop hanging from a telephone pole in the neighborhood. Not sure who's hooping next to the faux-farmhouse these days, but the former player in me appreciates the nod to the game I love.

Sunrise over Uptown.

I also get to see the sun come up over the foothills, a form of compensation I have not earned much in my life. And there are moments, like this one, where I forget for a second that, in the past, I only ever saw skies like this at the end of long, sleepless nights.

But back to the truck from the beginning of this post. So my dad found this truck, out in the country outside of Modesto, California where my folks had recently moved, and he bought it as a project. It needed work—body, frame, engine—that he intended to share with me over the next couple of years. We'd talked project cars for years, but we never had the money or the time for one.

So we started when I finished that first year, tearing the truck down to the frame and pulling the huge engine the previous owner had dropped in the thing and then grinding and sanding and working over the body panels between the demands of Dad's job pastoring a new church and my 15-17 hours a day stocking shelves for Pepsi. I think I worked on the hood alone for more than a week.

As we worked, Dad told me about what he wanted to do with the truck. Pull the original bench in the cab and replace it with bucket seats. Pull the rusted-out bed off the back and replace it with a flatbed of treated oak panels. Beef up the rear axle with a heavier gauge of gears to handle an engine and transmission combo that was much larger than Henry Ford ever intended for this model.

He also told me stories of the cars he'd worked when he was younger while we poured over catalogs and went to stores and junk yards looking for parts we needed at prices my folks could afford. And, more than anything, we dreamed about what we hoped our truck would turn out like. We scraped and ground and worked until, as they all do, that summer came to an end and I left for Los Angeles and my sophomore year.

And that was the end of it. I never lived in their house again, my summers committed to jobs that would help pay for my next year of school and internships I hoped would get me a career after I was done. I'd check in every once in a while about the progress Dad had made, but it slowed and then stopped and then he'd sold the truck.

I still remember standing in the space it had occupied in the garage the first time I visited after he sold it. It felt like a personal failure. Like I'd lost the chance to help Dad do something he'd always wanted to do. My parents were the types who sacrificed a lot to raise us, and I just wanted to give a little back. But life doesn't always give that kind of time to what we want.

Years passed and, other than in the scattered conversations we had about that truck, I hadn't really thought about it until I came across this one on my walk. It's not the same (a double axle vs. our single, original engine vs. the Pontiac beast we had, it's likely a year or two more recent a model). But for all intents and purposes, it is the same truck and I felt that same feeling of loss...but only for a moment.

Call it part of the aging process, but I've learned that some projects—some seasons in life for that matter—are brief and never meant to be complete. Rather, they highlight our desires and, if we're fortunate, give us even a moments' time to engage in them. For a few months, my dad and I shared a project and a dream for what it might become. We never finished, but we'd made a point of working together simply because we both wanted to. If there is a more relevant model of being a father, I haven't found it.

I guess what it reminds me is that not everything I do needs to be completed to be of value. It's the willingness to engage the passion and need of my moment that matters most. This, when I allow it to be, has acted as leavening to my Type A tendencies.

I took a picture of the new truck not to write about it, but to send it to Pops. His reply: How much is the guy asking? It wasn't for sale. But then, three weeks later, it was. So I'm inquiring, reminded that just because a dream doesn't happen on our schedule doesn't mean it won't ever be realized.