pomegranate

Dickens and DVDs

I wanted to post a link for the Dickens Challenge site, where if you wanted to see all of the work together at one place, you could do so.

http://johndishon.com/test/

I've really enjoyed working on this project, and it's been very inspiring to me to read everyone elses's work as we progress along. I'ts one of those things that makes you want to shout from the rooftops, "Step away from that videogame. Exit that chatroom. Turn off that TV. Go start a writing project!" If everyone was working on a writing project, the world would be a happier place. This, I believe.

And I am going to start writing more in my blogs here again. I was thinking that I would like to write at least one post a week in http://weledger.typepad.com/dvdsandme/, a blog mostly about DVDs that I have watched, but I also veer into movies, sometimes films, and TV, or in present day, the land of syndication I sure hope the writers get their just compensation soon.  Someday, i hope to write again in my music blog, http://weledger.typepad.com/driving_in_my_car/, but that one you really have to listen and think. Who has time for that?

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 3

One day, right before Mary made a mistake, Laura said, “Do you know what I hate the most?”

They were at her apartment, a place Mary felt she didn't visit nearly enough. You see, there was this bridge. Laura lived in San Francisco. Mary lived in the East Bay. You wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal for either one of them to drive to the other's home, but somehow it had always felt huge. This hadn't started with Laura's illness. It started from the moment Laura had moved here several years into their friendship. Mary came to visit her more. It was more glamorous being in the city. Laura knew her turf. There were no surprises. But she could drive to Laura's apartment, and they could spend some time together, and she could exclaim over the people. How could people from one side of a bridge dress so differently from the other? How did the food taste so much better? Why are your cafes nicer? These are questions Mary would ask, and then she would go home.

Laura said, “What I hate the most is when people say that I'm looking great.”

They were lying on her bed, their heads propped up with pillows. The TV had been moved from the livingroom to the bedroom a while ago. There was a pile of DVDs on the table. They were taking a break from their marathon.

Mary nodded and thought that she had been about to say that all day. Laura had lost the weight she had gained from previous medications. She was back to her petite self.  Her body looked like her own  again. She had found some cute turbans. Her skin glowed.

“I want to say to them that things aren't what they seem,” she said. “I want to say you don't know what's going on inside.” She smiled and looked at Mary. “I actually want to bare my teeth after I say that, maybe growl a little. Let them think I can puncture their flesh.” She sipped her black tea. “They only think they know why they're scared to be around people with cancer.”  She drank some more liquid. “I've been watching way too many horror films,” she said.

Laura had started watching these movies on a lark. They were easy to find on cable. She had never seen them before. Late at night, when she couldn't sleep, the Candyman, the Rings, all the Nightmares on Elm Streets were there for the taking.  It was something Mary could no longer do. As a child, she had been obsessed with scary movies. Even though they gave her nightmares, she felt compelled to ask for the ticket, to go sit in the dark, and then stay up all night, spooked by sounds and imaginings. And it wouldn't just be for one night.  At random moments throughout her life, alone in the dark, the film projector in  her head would begin to play every scary scene she had ever seen starting from childhood. There seemed no way to erase  that film, no way to stop it running, but there no longer seemed to be a reason to add  to it.

When Mary and Laura first became friends, they both lived near the lake that they had first walked around, looking for geese, a bird that was never too hard to find, especially since they had decided that they no longer wanted to migrate. This was a damn good home.  Even the geese knew it. After that first walk, Mary and Laura  met there regularly.  Sometimes, when Mary thought of those walks, she imagined them as an old time movie, one of those Fred Astaire productions. In her mind, their steps were as wondrous as his dance on the ceiling, two skinny girls, one small, one taller, a female Mutt and Jeff, hurling words out as fast as their legs could move, swinging their arms, and laughing.

“Why couldn't the air hold the words?” Mary thought. “If I could only hear them now, I would transcribe them.”

She did this for a living from her home, a studio apartment with a corner of the room reserved for her work. People gave her tapes, and she typed out what they said. It was an odd way to make money, but it seemed to suit her. She was exact. She cared about commas. She learned all kinds of things from listening to their voices that she then had to keep to herself.

The other day, while cleaning her room, she came upon a tape that Laura had made for her years ago. “Mary and Laura's Radio Debuts,” she had written as a title. On Side A, Mary heard the familiar voices of Click and Clack from Car Talk, and there she was, earnestly talking about her Toyota Tercel and the clicking sound she heard, and how then it would lose all of its momentum and stop dead right on the spot.

“It's the clutch,” they told her. As she listened, she marveled at how gentle they were with her, telling how how much it would cost, bringing up the idea that it might not be a worthwhile investment for an older car with significant mileage.

“But Mary loves this car” -- was it Click or Clack who said this? After years of listening to their program, Mary still could not tell the two apart. “She needs to try to save it.” On this, they all agreed.

On the other side of the tape, Mary heard the dulcet tones of the host of a local radio show broadcast live on Saturday mornings. It was a good walk away from Laura's San Francisco apartment. She would meet Laura there, and then they would  climb up and down several hills to the studios, where she would swoon at the host, and on their walk home, Laura would repeat in the kindest way that friends do when they really try to to burst a bubble, “But could you really imagine him at your apartment? What do you honestly think he would think of that green carpet?”

An improvisational acting group was there on that day. They asked if anyone would volunteer their datebook. Laura gave hers up in a flash. They asked her name. “Laura,” she heard her friend say in such a faraway voice, as if she was already in a distant country, rather than several rows up, sitting right next to her. And they acted out a week of events that Laura had written in her book. Listening to it now, Mary thought, “Did we truly spend money and time on “Dick Tracy” Did we actually plan such an outing?” They walked around the lake. They went to a party hosted by one of Mary's former bosses. At one moment, the actress playing Laura got confused and started calling herself Mary. Then in the skit, she called Mary up, “This is Laura,” she announced. “I've decided to use my own name again.”

When the skit was over, Mary played the rest of the tape. She kept thinking that surely, Laura was on Car Talk, too, and that at the next radio show, she had certainly brought her datebook in, and they had done her life, at least what  that week of her life would like from the perspective of an improvisational acting group. Didn't they both do that?

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 2

In the afternoon, while people were at work, Laura watched “Matlock.”

She tried to explain it to Mary one day while they talked on the phone.

“It's comforting to me,” she said. “I can doze to it. And then when I wake up, there's Andy Griffith. And for a minute, I think it's Mayberry, but then I remember that he's a lawyer now, and that justice will be served, because how can it not be?  Because, even if this is another show, it doesn't matter. He will always be Andy from Mayberry.”

Mary felt the weight of the receiver in her hand. The whistle showed up in her head, that theme song from their childhood, a jaunty, innocent tune that welcomed you into a town where Don Knotts could be a deputy, and Floyd was their silly town drunk, and Aunt Bea could be counted on for lemonade.

“You know, I've never seen Matlock," she said.

She tried to keep her voice even. She didn't tell Laura that she couldn't imagine ever watching it, that it was entertainment designed for people who wore polyester and looked forward to the Early Bird dinner. It was for people who found the acting on “Murder She Wrote” nuanced. In her private version of hell, they ran “Matlock” in a continuous loop.

“Dick Van Dyke was on it today,” Laura said. “He was a judge who murdered his mistress and framed her lover.”

Mary imagined Rob Petrie jumping over furniture in a long black robe. This time, he lands on his feet.

Sometimes Mary thought that she and Laura became friends, because they both weren't ordinary citizens. They belonged to one of the tribes who had to go to church basements and make their identity known.

“I'm Mary,” she would say.  “Anorexic/bulimic.”

Anorexic/bulimics didn't have their own meetings. You had to hang out with garden variety overeaters who had no inkling of the power to be found in wasting away.  At 12 years old, Mary imagined that a devil seduced her. He woke her up out of slumber, whispered in her ear, told her she was so, so pretty, asked her if she would like to be ideal. And she smiled and pushed her plate away and said yes, oh, yes, please, teach me. And she grew smaller and smaller and watched the horror in the faces around her, and the devil tickled her ribs, and told her it wouldn't be long now. But then one day something broke. She found a magazine under her mother's bed with a page folded to an article. It was all about a new disease. Anorexia nervosa, they called it. As she read, the demon screamed. She heard him race away. She imagined it was to regroup. The next day she began to eat and didn't want to stop. She would eat and throw up and picture herself deep in the ground. She would lie there and think that she could almost hear that demon again, and then things would be so much more orderly. This insanity went on for 10 years, and then she found herself in church basements, listening  to other people's stories, and sometimes saying her own.

She had come to the conclusion that the reason why anorexic/bulimics didn't have their own meetings was because if they all met in one room, the space would most likely explode. We're all just too intense, she thought, we need our more regular folk around us. She was glad Laura was her friend. Over time, she could say, I danced with the devil. We waltzed. We did a mean minuet. We sure the fuck did the tango. But in the end, I picked up my dance card and went home.

The Untitled Leap -- Chapter 1

Mary told her it was like baseball.

“I can't sit down and watch it any more. I've got to be moving. I have to listen to it.”

She told her it was about a rhythm that got in her head, that even though no game was the same, even though there was no clock and always surprises, there was a pace, a motion, and when that game was on in the background, nothing, it seemed, could ever go wrong.

She told her this while she cradled the phone in her hand, the TV set on with the game in full flower, but no code was broken, as she was talking on the phone. She was imparting important information.

“Why is that man crouching?” her friend asked, her eyes on her TV at home.

Mary paused a minute, digesting the simplicity of the question.

“He's the catcher.”

The batter hit the ball back into the net. Silence.

“Do you know about foul balls?” Mary asked. “Do you know about three strikes?” “Okay,” she said,  “We'll have to start from the very beginning.”

Mary had met her friend, Laura,  twenty years ago in Berkeley, in a church basement on a Sunday morning, at one of those meetings that you go to, because if you didn't, you'd be face down in a box of doughnuts at best. Yes, she was there, because she had been humbled by doughnuts, and the only difference between that day and a year ago was that now she had no illusions about it. So she sat on a cold, metal chair holding a styrofoam cup of weak ass coffee that did nothing to hold back the headache that haunted her. She sat in that chair as a tiny woman with long, curly hair stood up and introduced herself, and proceeded to speak.

If you asked Mary today, she couldn't tell you any of the words that Laura said.

“My head hurt too much,” she'd say.  “'I could hardly stand sitting there.”

She said, “I thought about walking out, but instead at the end of the meeting, I walked up and talked to her.”

She said, “it felt like I didn't even know that I was doing it.”

She said, “I just meant to say that I liked what she said.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone at those meetings.”

She said, “I never talk to anyone.”

But Laura thanked her. Then she looked her in the eyes and  said, “I was going to walk around the lake and look at the geese. Do you want to come?”

Mary closed her eyes, felt the pain in her head, and said yes.

Now, on the telephone, she told her friend, “Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

She said, “It might not be a project that you want to undertake.”

She thought of what she would like to do if she had a terminal disease. Learn how to speak Italian.  Play the mandolin. Walk every day. See every possible bird she could. Watch them fly. Learning the A, B, Cs of baseball would not be high on her list. If she thought about it truly, the rhythm in her head that comforted her came from years of fandom. It seemed instantaneous to her now, but it was no quick fix.

She could hear her friend tiring.

“What if we talked tomorrow?” she said.

The Dickens Challenge

I'm going to be participating in an writing activity, instigated by writer Tim Hallinan, http://www.timothyhallinan.com, called the Dickens Challenge. A number of writers will be posting one chapter a week of a project a la Dickens and his serial novels. My work will be called "The Untitled Leap." Please pardon the rust.

Here is a list of the other writers involved in this Challenge, and where you can find their work:

John Dishon, newly married and newly out of college, is a beginning novelist with special interests in Asian culture and literature, who sees the Challenge as a way of getting one of his ideas for a novel out of his head and into written form. His book will begin Monday, December 17.  It’s called Country Snow and it can be found at www.johndishon.com

Nadja (NL Gassert) is working on the second book in her gay romantic suspense series set on lush, tropical Guam: When a vengeful STALKER seeks to punish Mason Ward for the sins of his past—and present—the security specialist needs to fight to save himself and those closest to him. Nadja will begin to post on Monday, December 17 and you can read her at http://write-experience.blogspot.com/

Timothy Hallinan is a novelist who lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok, Thailand.  The Fourth Watcher, which is the next novel in his Bangkok series, will be published in June 2008 by William Morrow.  (The first, A Nail Through the Heart, is out now.)  His Challenge book, Counterclockwise, will start Monday, December 17 at http://www.timothyhallinan.com/blog/

Steve Wylder is an Amtrak ticket agent and freelance writer living in Elkhart, Indiana and Bloomington, Illinois. His most recent published work is “Time Passages: Reflections on the Last Train Home,” in Remember the Rock Magazine. His contribution to the Dickens Challenge is tentatively titled “Things Done and Left Undone” and will begin Monday, December 17 at : http://ontheslowtrain.blogspot.com/

Lisa Kenney is a telecommunications industry account executive and beginning novelist who lives in Denver. She’s tackling the Challenge with a Dickensian themed story with the working title Foundling Wheel and will begin posting excerpts Monday at Eudaemonia.  Lisa, bless her brave soul, will begin to post on Monday, December 17.\

Usman is a businessman and writer who lives in Pakistan and has recently completed a book, which is now in revision. His work for the Challenge will be a mystery/thriller for which he’s still gathering ideas. (Welcome to the club.) It’s not titled yet but when he publishes, beginning around January 1, 2008, it’ll be at http://reality967.livejournal.com