Driving in Snow: The Most Important Thing I Learned in College

The only real explanation for why am one of the dozens of people in Northern Virginia that knows how to drive in the snow is because I spent four years of my life going to college in Rockingham County. During the winter down there snow was a regular occurrence and everyone knew how to deal with it. There was none of the Northern Virginia escapades of drives either making themselves an obstacle by over reacting or being a hazard by pretending nothing was going on. The normal flow of traffic dropped by about ten miles an hour and everyone went along with it, and when there was an incident the emergency responders knew how to deal with it.

That was my main issue this morning. I knew there would be plenty of idiots on the road and I knew there would be incidents, but I had to be where I had to be and venturing out in this mess wasn't an option. In Rockingham County an army of sand trucks would have been out through the night and plows would have been working overtime to keep the roads clear and nothing would be shutdown for 4-6 inches of snow. It would've been life as normal, but Fairfax County isn't Rockingham County and my only home was that most people would stay in their homes.

Why I Quit on the Job Search

I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.

As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.

Finished

I didn't sit there staring at the final poem or call a friend and tell them i was done. I didn't even post a message on social media. My 100 days of writing project became a private affair and when I finished I kept it to myself, but it was more than that. I had no feeling of relief or accomplishment. I was finished with this large project that I had poured myself into, and yet when I finished I had no feelings about it. I was done and that was it.

I had planned out the final poem for about a month. I had figured out what it would be about and was only waiting for day 100 so that I could write it. Which brings up the question of when is something written. Was this poem really the work of day 100 or was it from day 70? Is a poem written when it is put on paper or when the idea is conceived? I cannot give the answer to that, but if I had to I would say it is the latter. I do most of my writing in my head. Often times the act of putting fingers to keyboard is a final motion. The draft, first revision, and sometimes the second or third revision have already happened in my mind before my index finger makes that first keystroke.

The Best Game I Don't Want to Play

One of the first computer games I ever played was Sid Meier's Pirates, but I never beat the game. I've owned this game on no less than four separate occasions. It was given to me on a floppy disk and then when we owned a computer without a floppy drive I bought it on CD. After that I ended up buying a downloadable version on one of my laptops and finally I bought the iOS version for my iPAD. I've never stopped enjoying the game, but to me the game wasn't about finding the lost sister. It was about being a pirate and taking over the Caribbean for whatever country I was representing.

Now, 26 years after Pirates was first released there is a new pirate game and my feelings about it are much the same. I am talking about Assassin's Creed IV. I've played the game for a bit now and I should be deeper into it than the fifth chapter, but I don't want to play the actual game. I want to roam the Caribbean causing mischief and mayhem. I want to take down ships, improve my ship, and then take down bigger ships. I find the game extremely fun, but the main quest feels like a side adventure in the life of a pirate, and as of right now I've left it far behind me and have spent much more time pillaging and raiding the Spanish Main.

The hallmark of a truly great open world game is that it gives you the freedom to create your own game. All the times I've played Pirate my game was to take over the world. I turned it into a game of Risk with pirates and as of right now I am playing Assassin's Creed IV in much the same way. I don't know what will happen when I have the ship fully upgraded. I am sure I will finish the main quest. It hasn't gotten that intriguing but I am generally curious to see where it goes, and you have to play the main quest to unlock some of the better equipment in the game.

Some of my feeling about the main quest line might be that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed III immensely and the best innovation in that game was the combat. That is gone in IV and Edward Kenway plays much weaker than Conner. Conner flowed through combat and taking down large groups of enemies wasn't much of a challenge. There were more than a few times that my entire play session involved me running through the wilderness reenacting scenes from The Patriot.

I found the combat to be the best part of that game, and that is what I find lacking in IV. With all that being said I think I am going to enjoy IV more as a game. The navel battles and the joy of being a pirate are what make it fun. The Assassin's Creed part of the game feels like it is almost an afterthought, and I am ok with that, because like Sid Meier's Pirates years ago I don't need to even play the game to have fun playing the game.      

The Government Shutdown and the Dystopian Future

The current state of American politics is like something out of a science fiction novel, and not a particularly good one at that. I can almost see a down on his luck writer sitting in the SciFi Network offices pitching this story about how one day the United States government collapsed because they just couldn't get along anymore. The entire point of politics became too much about figuring out which side was more to blame than getting anything done and then nothing got done and before you knew it mountain lions were roaming the streets of Washington DC. In real life there is allegedly a mountain lion roaming the streets of DC.

This is a great symbol for the current state of things as the biggest aspect of the government shutdown so far is that national parks are closed. That means the government has deemed the Grand Canyon closed. Think about for a second. The Grand Canyon is closed. Bull fucking shit it is. The Grand Canyon is huge. private helicopters can still fly over it so people can see it and I am sure hikers could get past whatever flimsy barriers the government has put up. If they really wanted to close national parks they would fill in the Grand Canyon with concrete. Maybe put a strip mall on top of it. Tarp over the waterfall in Yosemite and put a cork in Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Now that is a real shutdown.

Braving Whole Foods

Whole Foods wasn't always the hip trendy hell hole that it is now. It once was called Fresh Fields and it sold all the organic foods and that type of thing but without being overpriced and pretentious. My mother used to like to shop at the Fresh Fields in Springfield for produce because you could find things there that you couldn't get anywhere else. They had star fruit and kiwis and mangos before they became vastly popular and could be found everywhere. They also had a wide variety of melons and other exotic fruits and vegetables. They were basically nothing like they are now. It was mostly the worlds largest produce section. They didn't have much else and definitely didn't have all the growler filling stations of food preparation stands. They were a small operation grocery store offering specialized food that was hard to find at other stores.

Then other gourmet stares started to pop up and they offered all of the produce plus other things. I remember the first time I went into a Harris Teeter I thought it was magical and then I went to a Ukrop's and eventually a Wegman's. Each experience was better than the last, and each store was offering more and more and going to them was more like an event than grocery shopping, and then Whole Foods took it to another level. Fresh Fields was re-branded and was now going to be the organic super store of everything wholesome that would make you and the world healthy, and people bought in. Saying something is organic is a quick an easy way to double the price of anything. Going to other gourmet grocery stores may feel like an event for the shoppers but Whole Foods actually tries to make it an event.

The Obligation

Sometimes I feel an obligation to write. Part of that is I enjoy writing and I have fallen out of the habit before. Even if you enjoy something it is easy to stop doing it. You just start doing other things and then sooner or later you find yourself only doing other things, and so I have to force myself to write at times in order to make sure I set apart a little bit of time each day to do something I truly enjoy. The other part of it is that I am working on something I've named, "100 day of writing," and now that I am over the halfway point I can say that I've run out of ideas. The poem I wrote today was actually about being out of ideas. As of right now it feels like I am trying to squeeze juice from the pulp and rind that is left over after a citrus fruit has been juiced.

The real thing I need is to do something. When I first started out with the 100 days of writing it was because my mind was full of ideas. Now I have emptied out those ideas, refilled it, and emptied it again. I also did a good amount of hiking and other activities early on, but after 50 days I've allowed myself to fall back into the routine of daily life. I get up, eat my Coco Puffs, go to work, eat lunch, sit around wasting time, eat dinner, and go to sleep. There is plenty to do around here and the main inspiration for this project was discontent at how this area rejects history and nature. How Norther Virginia is nothing but a bedroom community. That there is no here here.

Dark Fantasies and GTAV

Have you ever expressed to someone who is a close friend a thought you have? A momentary desire formed in anger or frustration from the dark recesses of your mind, and their reaction is to say that isn't normal or it is weird. First let's start with a little story so you know what my dark, evil thoughts look like.

It is a common thing in this area for parents to wait for their children to get home from school. They also do this in the morning but the arrival is more scattered so not as bad, because the morning largely depends on children getting ready. The parents that have been at home all day or are coming home in time to pick up their children aren't on any time crunch and therefor gather early and in mass. The worst part of this is because they are waiting for their children they believe laws don't apply to them and will park their cars at a stop sign. This is especially bad on roads where there isn't normally street parking and because these roads aren't made for street parking more of the road is taken up.

Walter White: The Modern Anti-Hero

Stop reading this if you don't want the latest episode of Breaking Bad spoiled for you. Now with that warning aside I will write an introductory paragraph that doesn't talk much about breaking bad. I don't do much writing at night because I don't like writing at night. I feel wasted and spent at the end of the day, but with this morning's events at the Navy Yard my focus throughout the day was elsewhere and I also didn't much feel like revisiting fictional violence in a world so full of real violence. I really have nothing to say about the events at the Navy Yard as all the facts aren't known and speaking without facts is a quick way to become foolish.

I had these thoughts for a couple days. Even before Ozymandias aired I knew what was going to happen. Hank was going to die. He had to die. Before the season began that is how it had to happen, but this episode was Walter White's move from modern anti-hero to tragic figure and then it will swing back somewhere in between for the final two episodes. The exact moment was when his family was huddled together on the floor crying while Walter White screamed that they were a family. Everything he has done has been for his family and like any good anti-hero he has his own sense of morals that runs counter to society's at large. Walter White never saw it as a big deal that he was cooking meth or becoming a crime lord because he was doing it for his family, and a lot of this was rationalizing for him because in more than a few ways Walter White is very similar to Jay Gatsby.

What is Going on Here

There is this gas station on 123 and during the middle of the summer I got gas there on a regular basis. It sort of became my go to gas station because I drive by it multiple times on my work route and it is easy to get gas there and it is also and Exxon and accepts Safeway points, but then as summer started to wind down I noticed something. Other gas stations started to lower their prices. Just a couple weeks ago $3.50 in Manassas was a deal but then suddenly gas in Centerville was $3.50 and then $3.50 hit Fairfax. In case you are wondering gas in Manassas is now $3.20, but there this gas station off of 123 sits still charging $3.89.

It is weird to see, because there is always someone there getting gas. I should mention again that this gas station is on 123 and not only that it is on 123 in Oakton. There is a gas station next to a Giant less than 100 feet away charging $3.65 which is still high for the area but it isn't $3.89. In many ways I wish my phone wasn't a piece of crap so I could take a pitcher of this and prove this madness to everyone, but I can't.

The Art of Storytelling

I think about this often when a movie is remade, and I am never against a remake. The new movie is most likely going to be bad and even if it is good it won't be as good as the original. Few remakes are. Scareface is one exception that most people would point to as a newer version better than the original. There are a few others but that is the one that I can grab off the top of my head. The big thing to me is that I do not understand the difference in remaking a movie or making a book into a movie. It is the point of storytelling.

Think back to the cultures of the past where little was written down and storytellers traveled from town to town. Perhaps in one town the story ended with the brave warrior saving the princess and defeating evil, but in the next town the details changed and there was no princess and the evil ended up only vanishing instead of being completely defeated. It was a small change and perhaps it was because the storyteller couldn't remember the ending he told in the last town or he felt the different town needed a different ending. There was nothing fixed about the story and any details could be changed.

Everyday Absurdity

It is finally summer. After months of mild weather the normal hell of the DC summer has decided to show up. It is September and too late for this type of heat. I was prepared for it in July and August but it never came, and now it is here and it is late. The other day I saw a woman raking leaves. She was making large piles of dead leaves but the trees in her yard were full of bright green leaves and it was 90 degrees and humid as the banks of the river Styx. It was absurd to see. Made more so by the fact that none of her neighbors yards had enough leaves to even make a small pile, but here she was making large piles of leaves. I wonder if this is her ritual. To wait for Indian summer and clear the ground so that the Autumn leaves can fall and rest on her yard through all of winter, spring, and summer and then next year she will do it all again. That is the only way there could have been that many leaves. 

This is something I saw during my daily life. It was absurd. It was part of life. I didn't have to make it up because it was happening right in front of me. I had a friend tell me once I might make a good stand-up comedian because I tell absurd stories, and it started me on wondering if I attract the absurdity or if I seek it out. I told this friend a story of Baltimore and how I am angry that they have good food. The fifth best BBQ ribs, the best BBQ chicken, the second best fried chicken, and the second best pizza I've ever eaten all exist in and around Baltimore. It is a city full of great food, and it is affordable. Now about that fried chicken. 

Non-Variations on a Theme

That thing I wanted to write about yesterday and forgot I remembered sometime today. I was just sitting there and, boom, it hit me. It was like the thought had never been gone at all. It returned so quickly and suddenly I felt dumb for having forgotten it. My idea yesterday was to write out this issue I've been having with my own writing. I am stuck on certain themes. I don't know if that is because there are so many themes in the world or if it is because I live in an area where everyone is at war with time.

The very nature of this area is people fighting time. They are always trying to beat time. Think about the term Rush Hour. It exists because we've created a structure where everyone shows up to work around the same time, works for a certain number of hours, and then goes home. What if things worked differently? What if time wasn't the driving force? What if people worked to get the job done instead of working to put in their time so that they could collect their money? 

The Beauty of Knowing

I was planning to write something all day and now that I've set down to do it I have forgotten what I was going to write. I remember looking forward to it very much and it had something to do with how I wanted to write, and I am going to sit here typing until I remember it or I have around 500 words of some strange stream of conscious. People online always ask how to get rid of writer's block and I always suggest that they tell a story about an item on their desk, but how does that work when you had a plan and it all fell apart. This morning I knew what I wanted to write, but I didn't have the time to write it, and the thoughts were so clear and vivid in my mind that I never even considered for a second taking notes on the matter.

It had something to do with the title. I remember thinking about situations and how some people are so convinced they know things, and this comes across in their writing. My belief is that language should be direct but never absolute. We live an absurd world full of strangeness and things that cannot be explained. I watched this video the other day:

Compartmentalizing History

I was thinking yesterday about how we think about history, or not so much history but how we separate certain parts of happenings. In many ways it can't be done. Hemingway wrote about World War I so much it is hard to forget that he was there, but it is easy to forget that The Great Gatsby came out in 1925, a year that Babe Ruth "struggled" appearing in only 98 games and hitting .290/.393/.543. We don't think of Babe Ruth having played baseball at the same time as the great modernist were penning what can be thought of as the height of American literature.

I started thinking about this because I saw a note on how Babe Ruth hit his first career homerun in 1914, and when I see the year 1914 my first thought is World War I. June 28th of 1914 was when Aschduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. It was the beginning of a war that would be come to known as The War to end all Wars even though some of its aftermath would directly lead to several other wars including World War II. We don't think of this world as being as connected as it is. The same paper that mentioned the assassination of the Archduke had a box score that mentioned that days happenings from the National League, the American League, and the Federal League.

The Glory of the Mundane

I admire an artist that can make the mundane interesting. To me this is the high point of art. That a writer can write about perfectly normal everyday people and make them as fascinating as a knight saving the world from an evil dragon that was once a zombie. It really is something to read a book find yourself furiously turning the pages only to realize that what you've been reading is a relatively common dinner conversation. There is a high level of skill involved in capturing life and not only that capturing the life that happens everyday.

Think about what you remember from your daily life. You can't recall every single moment. I am certain no one reading this remembers brushing their teeth. You may remember that you did it but you don't remember every stroke or what set today's brushing of the teeth apart from yesterdays, and because we so often times fail to remember these remarkably unmemorable moments it is hard to put them down in writing.

This brings me to the overall point I want to make. I was going to call this blog post "Why I Started Writing Again," but "The Glory of the Mundane" sounded much better, and the reason I started writing again isn't an easy thing to answer and has nothing to do with writing itself, but as I stated above there are things I like in writing and so when I saw an interview with Samuel L. Jackson about Quentin Tarantino there was a part that stuck out to me. Samuel L. Jackson was talking about the people that have been critical of Tarantino and he mentioned that what originally drew him to Tarantino was that he was a filmmaker who loved films.

It goes back to all those old saying your High School English teacher told you about how you have to be your own toughest critic. Here I was enjoying books and writing and poetry and yet I felt I was the last person that should judge my work. We are taught to be our own toughest critics but at the same time that there are people better suited to judge us than ourselves. I am not certain that both can be true. So this statement on Tarantino sparked something in me. It reminded me of how I used to write and many times I wouldn't like what I wrote but other people would, and because it pleased other people I thought it was good, but yet I view myself as a person perfectly capable of judging good writing, and so with this new writing, while not writing for myself, I am writing work that I like.

That was really only part one of what caused me to start writing again. That was the ignition switch. It took a few other instances for everything to explode. The next was a Kevin Smith question and answer session that he filmed. It was about the controversy caused by Red State and he said many of the same things Samuel L. Jackson said about Tarantino, but about himself. He was making movies that he would like and then he added another layer. He told the story of his father's death and how he got there too late and his brother told him that his father died screaming. This shocked him, but it also caused in him a realization that we're all going to die screaming or die in someway, and if we don't leave all that we can of ourselves on Earth then we wasted our lives. He then recited the famous Gretzky quote, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

That was the second thing. I guess Samuel L. Jackson on Tarantino gave me the means, write what you like, Kevin Smith the opportunity, and finally I got the motivation in two separate parts. The first was Mick Foley, the professional wrestler, oddly enough. He was talking about how he knew early on in his career that he was never going to be strong enough, agile enough, or have the look to take a traditional approach to wrestling. He had to carve out his own unique style and be different enough from everyone else to get noticed.

I don't really know exactly what this meant to me or how it became step one of what happened next, but then I was driving home from a client's house and saw the most perfectly tan jogger wearing hardly any clothes. I wanted to drive after her and tell her that if truth was beauty then she was the truest thing the world had ever created. It was that old familiar feeling of inspiration. Something I had inexplicably lacked for so many years and it had returned. Early the next day I furiously typed an introduction and began my 100 days of writing. An ode to that jogger was going to be day one and yet I still haven't written it yet. She was in many ways a muse come to life. I glimpsed her from my car as she turned down a side street, was struck by inspiration, looked back and she was gone. Out of my life forever, and there is no chance she is as beautiful as I remember.

That brings us full circle, because my life is wholly uninteresting and if I want to be able to write for 100 days I have to be able to write about the glory of the mundane. I have to be able to capture life, but not the meaning or essence of life but the everyday normal boring life of a 32 year old pet sitter. I have to be able to show people the world as I see it and I can never be afraid to do it, I have to do it in my own unique style, and it has to be something that I enjoy, and if I enjoy it then there is a chance there are other like minded people who will also enjoy it.

This is my mundane happening of the week. I was leaving the grocery store and a cashier asked someone if they found everything they need, and in response to that somewhat absurd question I wrote this:

At the Safeway

I was taught

the meaning of life by

the Trix rabbit,

found love in the arms

of Aunt Jemima, and learned

the secrets of peace in

a sermon delivered by

an Anheuser-Busch eagle.

Coexist

Spatial courtesy is difficult for a lot of people. I am sure you have encountered them. The person that walks into the near empty bathroom and takes the stall or urinal directly next to you even though there are plenty that would give you space and enough illusion of peace to do your business. Then there are the people that do the same thing in the near empty dining area of a restaurant. When a place is mostly empty the last thing most people want to do is be forced to sit next to complete strangers. Especially if those complete strangers have screaming children. Most people want and demand space, but there are always those few people that have never learned to mind their surroundings.

This brings me to this morning while entering a near and surprisingly empty 66. If you are familiar with interstate 66 in Northern Virginia then you know it is rarely ever empty, but as it was this morning I let the hypnosis of routine take over and got lost in my mind. Then, almost immediately after deciding to relax, a car starts trying to merge into me. Not speeding up to get in front of me nor slowing down to get behind me, but attempting to occupy the same space I am currently in. This is confusing because there is no traffic and no need for someone to slowly inch over into a new lane, but there this person was attempting to do just that.

The Big Whatever

I should start out by saying that I don't know what I am doing here. I got this notion a while back to restart my personal blog, and then decided that I wouldn't. I instead decided to start working on a writing project that I have come to call 100 days of writing. I call it that because that is what it is. Every day for 100 days I am going to write something. I am on day 31, and in many ways I feel I am already reaching my limit. It is hard to come up with something new to say every day, but I am almost a third of the way done and still have plenty of ideas.

I want to write about places that were important to me as a child or young adult. I want to write about the last time I was in Springfield Mall as that place was very important to my development, but I feel I need to revisit these places and it is impossible to revisit a place that is gutted. Springfield Mall as a mall is no more. It is now anchor stores that will soon be part of a town center. The last time I was there it was all white hallways with all the stores boarded up behind the whiteness, and I kept wondering if they looked as I remembered them behind the drywall. It was Springfield Mall of a bad horror movie and not the Springfield Mall of my youth and that is what I wanted to write.