Almost a Poem

"I saw where a hippo was not, and said no. This will not do." - Penny Arcade

The heat of the earth-worn stones presses against my feet. The silent stillness of the summer breeze teases my hair, lightly, gently, against my ears. I turn my head skyward and gaze, blinking only for my mind to comprehend the pervasive presence of the night above.

There will never be another night like this.

The crickets grow louder as they accept my trembling form into their hallowed homes. Shadows trick the corners of my vision, and my mind wanders from the sky, feeling its black, shining light wash over my subconscious as I snatch at the figures in my periphery.

There is no one there. Just the sky. The stars glare down at me, I imagine their heat, their light, and then...I'm floating. Speeding through space, through atmospheres and debris and silence, so much silence, a silence no one has ever heard before and will never hear, not in the future, not in the past.

I cannot understand the night sky. I cannot live there, I cannot visit, I am constrained by the lenses and frames and air of this earth. Of this planet. 

But there are many planets. The sky holds wonders, it holds fear and death and silence. And wonders.

One day, there will be those who travel the night sky. I will look up and know that although it is not night to them, it is night to me, and only during night can I feel them, see them, imagine them weightless, floating about space.

They will find a way to travel, find a way to live. The night sky will change, from impenetrable, imperfect silence to a conquered future home. Terraform, warp speed, hyperdrive, space station. One day, one day, one day. Not today, not my lifetime.

I will always have the night sky, but there will never be a night like this.

Although I imagine so much, so often, and gaze at the sky in its glory, it does not notice me. I feel the wind and see the figures and pretend, the universe cares. Cares for me, touches me, watches me as I watch it, it that cannot be quantified, explained, understood, examined.

They try to. They explore. Many years, many ships, many people, many places. It will never be understood. The earth is not understood, and so the universe cannot be examined. We are not ready. We are not advanced. We are not prepared. The night is powerful, and beautiful and calm and always, always there.

But it will never be like tonight, never again.

The crickets will forget me and chirp as they hop away. The sky will never shimmer again, not like tonight. The breeze will flow, warmer and warmer, then colder, colder, but never perfectly teasing like tonight. I will never feel alone and bonded to a million other lifeforms like I do tonight. The fading, fainting feeling of firm devotion to a world outside the world, a billowing landscape of rippling, empty space, will fall from my lips and mind and my imagination will never play with the shadows of night again.

I will never shut my eyes and blindly piece the constellations together with a heavy, ambivalent arm like I did tonight.

There will never be any more stars for me.

Not like tonight.

Familiar Territory

Wikipedia has trouble defining noir.

Film noir, that is. There isn't an article for written noir. I can look up hardboiled, or detective fiction, mystery fiction, whodunit, legal drama or even spy-fi, but I guess noir isn't a term applicable to fiction.

I find that odd, because I definitely like to write noir. Maybe someone who knows what those other terms mean would tell me that I don't write noir, because it doesn't exist in terms of fiction, but I don't really care. I like to write noir.

I know some people are unfamiliar with this style and genre, and unfortunately for the first (and only) time in my memory Wikipedia will not help you. Instead, question yourself this: have you ever heard of Raymond Chandler? The Big Sleep? The Maltese Falcon? L.A. Confidential, even? If you are familiar with any of these, then I feel assured that you can figure out what noir is without the help of a magical Internet encyclopedia.

So I like to write noir. I didn't know I was writing in that style at first. A few friends started a Facebook round-robin story in that style on my profile a few years ago, and I just jumped in and mimicked the tone that I perceived.

I must make a brief comment here: Tone is my thing. Lots of writers have a thing. Some are really good at characters, others plot, but I'm really good at tone. I can still write characters and plot and all that other necessary stuff well enough, but they are of lesser importance to me than tone.

I believe that I took to noir so easily because of its distinctive tone. I can't describe the tone but in mundane terms - "dark" and "heavy" and "Rorschach-from-Watchmen." My previous post, The Streetlight, is the best I've ever done at describing how I feel about the tone of noir. It was a fictional piece, I know, but I am a fiction writer and thus express myself through fiction. Sometimes I imagine myself alone, standing beneath a streetlight on the edge of an empty highway, silent but for a soft wind as I gaze into the dim glowing circle and imagine what to do next.

I also like imagining that I'm part of an adventure involving murder, sabotage, cigarettes and '67 Camaros. I've begun to dream in this noir tone, playing the role of the cynical protagonist in full trenchcoat and fedora, wandering the deserted night streets and seedy bars in search of femme fatales to backstab and helpless bystanders to rescue before disappearing down dark alleys. I blame this recent trend on a professor of mine who has encouraged my fascination by burning me disc after disc of 1940s classic film noir.

I am expressing this all on a public blog for one purpose, as given to me by another professor. I do not know what to write. I do not think anyone much cares to read my blog. But if I write according to a theme, I might begin to understand what I truly want to blog about.

For now, it seems inevitable that this theme stem from my gravitation toward writing noir.

The Streetlight

The wind blew softly through my hair. I could hear it, whispering, coaxing me along with its gentle words. The streetlight I stood under illuminated a small radius of cracked sidewalk and deserted black road. I was a wanderer, and the wind was my guide. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no one to remember my name.

Oh, but what a name it was, in those days of sorrow and excitement. In the days of adventure and intrigue. In the days before the streetlights.

I gazed at the edge of the circle of light encompassing my abandoned shadow. I was hesitant to move past it, to break the safety of the light, to move out into the darkness again. I spent all my nights wandering from streetlight to streetlight, as they were my havens. My oases from the desolate lives that everyone around me led.

I could not decide if I should yet move on or remain in this last haven. I stood on the edge of a vast stretch of land, not quite desert, not quite alive. That was wrong. There were many living things in the desert. But none of them provided comfort to a weary traveler. None held any answers for the lost, for the meek, for the lonely. It’s good, then, that I was none of those. 

But the space in front of me would soon surround me nonetheless, if I chose to cross the soft border of light I still gazed at so intently. I was not looking for answers from the light. I was not looking to the land to tell me what to do. I was not even looking at the streetlight for assurance or guidance, for I knew it would provide none. The answers had to come from the wind. For this was the same wind that had touched so many others, that had grazed so many cheeks, and tousled the locks of so many wanderers like myself. Perhaps it was the same wind that had taught me so much before, that had shown me the path when I was just as unsure of my road as I was tonight.

I liked to think that it was the same wind that reached the others I used to know. Part of me hoped they still took time to stop and ponder the wind as I had taught them to, so long ago. They had at first looked at me strangely, perhaps questioned my connection with sanity, as I could not tear myself away from the night sky, the light gray clouds, the enigmatic wind. But the longer I stood there in silence, the more relaxed they became, and soon we were all still, listening to the sound of the wind, searching for the answers in the sky. 

And it spoke to them. It told them things that it never told me. For the wind never whispered the same thing twice, and it sounded different to everyone who listened.

I stood, and waited for the wind. It had quieted for a moment, and I knew then that I was the only one who listened anymore. I knew that I was all alone, that there was no one left from that time. No one who thought of the wind and the sky and the clouds and the streetlights anymore. It was only me. It was only me again, for it was only me to begin with.

I hushed my thoughts and focused on the wind. Dawn would break in mere hours, and I must be away from here by then. But where was here? And where was there? I decided to move out, into the open desert plain, far away from human interaction. That is what I decided. But it wasn’t what the wind wanted. 

It became apparent that the wind was telling me to turn around. To go back. To follow the trail of streetlights once again, but this time to follow a different path. I would not retrace my steps. I did not know where I would go, but it wouldn’t be back to the same place.

What I didn’t know was the wind was leading me somewhere. It was showing me the path to what I truly desired, or thought I did. Perhaps I really only wished for peace of mind. But I didn’t know that at the time the wind showed me the way.

I also didn’t know that I was completely and utterly wrong. There was still someone out there, someone I used to know, who remembered the wind. Who remembered how to listen to it, how to discover what it was saying, and how to follow its instructions.

Someone who still remembered me.

And he was standing there, in the middle of the dark night, eyes closed, listening intently. And the wind would lead me back to him.

 - Taken from a discarded addition to a larger story (UT, for those familiar).

Things I Like: Fight Club

When I can't sleep, when my mind is a sloppy mess of hastily-strewn manure across a garden of trash, there is only one thing I do. It doesn't make sense for me to do this, but I do it anyway.
 

I watch Fight Club.
 

Fight Club is meant to be watched twice. The first time, it's a trip. Your mind is thrown, you become obsessed with the...twist. The second time you watch it, your eyes are open. Everything seems clearer, and you feel...intelligent.
 

There is not supposed to be a third time. If there is, it should be three years down the road, at your best friend's party or the day you decide to ditch work for no good reason. I've watched Fight Club more times than I can remember since I bought it with a birthday gift card. Sometimes I watch it every night. Sometimes I fall asleep ten minutes in. Sometimes I pass out during the third viewing in a row.
 

This is wrong. The point of a movie like Fight Club is to shock the mundane out of the boring saps who see it. Doing anything many times in a row makes it feel normal. Casual.
 

Comforting.
 

The point of Fight Club is to shock the viewer into re-examining their average life. By the twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth viewing, the only thing left to re-examine is the desire to continue watching.
 

I always skip two scenes: when Tyler is confronted by he owner of the bar where they hold Fight Club and when the narrator fights the poor bleach-blonde space monkey. I skip these scenes because they are examples of pure, senseless violence. Bloody, gory, graphic violence. I did not grow up immune to troubles. I was not raised away from the inevitabilities of a mortal body. But the act of destroying something beautiful for the sake of shocking the world or making yourself feel alive or, God forbid, appealing to the Halo-obsessed youth sends me into a state akin to illness. I do not get physically ill. I simply become so overwhelmed at the sight of the beautiful, rich blood spilling so vibrantly and explosively across a canvas of concrete that I react violently. Emotionally violent.
 

In my schoolgirl days, I prided myself on my strong stomach, callous sensibilities and daring nature. I ate the worm when the boys wouldn't. I stared staunchly at the screen when the girls sheltered their eyes. I told stories of blood with a smile on my face that was nearly cruel.
 

I was only this way because I was sickened by the world around me, with it's casualties and complexities and fanciful faux pas. In a way, I was trying to bring Fight Club into my own world. I was trying to make those around me understand the values of Fight Club. But I didn't have Fight Club to guide me; I didn't even know what I was trying to do. I knew I had something to prove to the world, but it wasn't until I was 18, legally an adult, that I finally put it all together.
 

And by that time, I was too late. The whole world had already seen it, contemplated it, dismissed it. And I was left with nothing but the movie. The movie that I've seen so many times that I don't need to watch the screen to follow along. And still I have no one to fight with, because the world has passed it by. 

But I continue to feel as if I have something to prove. I've never been in a fight, after all. And how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

I now have a blog.

Apparently. It will take some getting used to, I suppose.
As for the title...I don't really like going outside, especially when there are so many things to do inside. The Shire does not lie beyond my cul-de-sac, but rather in the pages of a novel. A really good novel with awesome characters and whirlwind plots and wonderful opportunities for escapism.
Why in the world would I ever go outside?