Alternative Plans

According to all the information that bombards my senses, this moment is Monday, the 4th of May 2009, at approximately 15:07. Today was going to be the day I wrote the epilogue wrapping up the serialized novel about the bored rich man with two childhoods. I decided to follow my whims, instead, and subjected myself to viewing a moving picture about a comic book character named "Logan" a/k/a Wolverine. Now, I feel like I'm a testosterone-adrenaline teenage junkie again, ready to race cars on the road and have a street fight against some wimp to make me feel superior. After the movie, I lost a street race with a driver on Cecil Ashburn Drive, whose car, an Oldsmobile Aurora, is in better shape than my '95 BMW 325i with its shot shocks, broken motor mounts and untuned engine. Alas, I admit defeat -- I am too cheap to fix my automobile. No more pretending to be a saloon racer!

I am opinionless, my ears rattled by a loud sound system that projects the audio accompanying the moving picture. When did we start believing that talkies are better than silent moving pictures that were accompanied by a piano, organ or small orchestra? Maybe that's why I have tinnitus.

I have spent more money lately than I should have, including a costly Waterford candy dish made in Ireland and sold at Belk's to me by Mary Jo Nash on the 1st of May. Another day of instructing on the 2nd. On the 3rd, finished reading "Bobbed Hair..." with another day of pretending this is my last day on Earth. Lots of rain lately - saved earthworms from drowning on my driveway during a heavy thunderstorm and/or dying a dry death in my driveway by throwing them in the red clay next to the house yesterday. Ate dinner at Beauregard's - fried strips of chicken breast covered in orange-habanero sauce - server's name was London Churchil (no kidding). Today, the ticket tearer and popcorn seller at the Rave Motion Pictures offered to find me a dogtag bearing the rip marks of Wolverine. Walked out of the theater the wrong way and couldn't get back to retrieve the movie souvenir.

Forget who I am. Keep thinking I'm the paranoid character from my book, a problem with getting into my stories too much. I'm not the character, which means I'm not planning to meet the future mother of my child and her best friend at a hotel near a teaching institute, when the main character would make the decision to leave his former life behind and start over, buying a fifth-wheel trailer and traveling around the country for a while with his new cohabitation partner and child, divorcing his wife and getting a fat check later on to make a down payment on a house in Marmouth, North Dakota, where he and his new family would help Dr. Bill Garstka from UAH with dinosaur digs in the summer while selling bead necklaces over the Internet the rest of the year. That's what my epilogue would have said had I taken time to write out a good one.

That's not who I am. Who am I? Still the wondering wanderer a/k/a the wandering wonderer. No special powers, no stash of millions in "merchandise" in the trunk of my car that fattens my offshore accounts. Just a regular guy with a habit of writing words. Time to detox and get my recent novel character(s) out of my thoughts so I can concentrate on new one(s).

Thinking about taking a regular job at a regular company, an 8-to-5 gig where I can forget about myself for a while and pretend I don't exist anymore, gathering material for another story in the process, if I'm lucky.

Munster lost to Leinster this past weekend, which tells the fortune of southwest Ireland, along with recent job redundancies, predicting that the Celtic Tiger will take a while to regain its strength. In the meantime, I want to find a job that gets me to Scotland in the next year or so. Ireland was the land of my second-to-last novel - time to pack away those memories and move forward, further east toward the land of my unknown beginnings. There'll be writing in there, too, if my luck holds out.

Still consulting for the small startup company. Getting them assistance in this economy is not quite like pulling hen's teeth. Thank goodness advice is still available and more importantly, useful!

The teaching gig is real, despite trying to pawn it off on my storybook character(s). Need to figure out how real I want to keep it. No telling, today. I have no business standing up in front of students/customers if I have no interest in the future, my thoughts drifting off in the middle of class like the absent-minded student I used to be, constantly asking myself who I am and what I'm doing here and why are some of those people looking at me as if I have something important to tell them? Gotta have a certain level of self-importance to stand up in front of a group and be the subject matter expert for a few hours at a time. Easy to do. Too easy, perhaps?

Need a topic for my next novel. In other words, who do I want to pretend to be for a while? Sometimes, I worry that I'm really a paranoid schizophrenic borderline personality type who thinks he's a writer. Oh wait, I am a paranoid schizophrenic borderline personality type who thinks he's a writer. I believe I'm what's called a chameleon - only now, with 40+ years of training, I've learned to wear my camouflage for longer periods of time. Let's see, I've been a sewer worker who was also a private investigator, a lesbian who went on a college spring break, a college student on an LSD trip, an office worker who attracted a group of people believing in multinational conspiracies, an adult guy being hunted by a vengeful childhood friend, a dead guy on the run from characters who've escaped from my other novels, a blogger disguised as a novelist...what else? I'm starting to lose track.

A long time ago, I tried group therapy because I didn't have any friends I felt I could be honest with about my feelings. One of the members of the group was the sports radio voice of a local traditionally black college, a guy named Ike who retired a while back. The other members of the group I can barely remember, including a neurotic woman who was always afraid someone in the group was going to commit suicide and set her therapy back to the beginning. Ike just wanted a group of people to talk with who didn't have a hidden agenda (he felt inferior and worried about his job, not wanting to give people a reason to blab about his mundane family secrets).

The man who led the therapy, Dr. Sim C. Liddon, told me that I didn't really need therapy. I was a normal guy who didn't know he was normal. All I needed to do was decide that I wanted to live a normal life and I'd be very successful. But normal is boring. I don't want to be a successful, boring person. In recent years, however, I gave in to Dr. Liddon's suggestion and succeeded in a boring job, traveling around the world doing boring things with other boring people, building a successfully boring financial portfolio. I proved he was right (and made my family happy because they like "normal" things to talk about and brag about, regardless of how boring it seems to me).

I suppose that's why I am who I am. I'm afraid of being normal and boring. But surprise, surprise! We're all boring to someone else. If you want to be exciting and fun, do as many different things in your life that you can so you're bound to make everyone you meet find you more than boring. They may hate you or love you but at least they're feeling something when your name is mentioned!

And so, back to the possible subjects for my next personality transformation. The character in my last novel showed a mean and hateful side - I wonder if I can build on those emotions. I've got a bunch of scenes I've built around the shenanigans of my primary/secondary schoolmates, including their sexcapades, poor school skills and police records. I've thought about furthering that line of thoughts into a character who digs up facts about schoolmates, writes a research paper / dissertation about the human thought process and proves that we never fully ditch the personalities we say we left behind after we grew up and became "decent" public citizens. The main character goes on international television (e.g., YouTube) with stories about the character's research, tearing apart the lives of schoolmates who, for instance, say they've found God but in reality cheat on their taxes and perform petty crimes, like taking office supplies, displaying traits of their childhood school cheating and thievery. The YouTube crew will have secretly followed the main character's schoolmates using hidden cameras and Internet-tracking software to build a profile of the schoolmates' adulthood. The YouTube exposé series will also track the schoolmates' children to show how the next generation displays the propensity for misbehavior they got from their parents' DNA, including, by now, college-level cheating and partying.

Naw, too easy. The main character has no personal conflict, unless its one of facing the psychological horror of messed-up adults he thought were truly innocent schoolmates, including former girlfriends he wishes he'd married. Again, this is boring stuff. Been done before from too many angles.

Okay, gloves off. What emotional/psychological issues do I want myself to face as the main character? Let's say I'm facing the grim reaper right now. I have 24 hours to live. I will be able to dictate my last set of thoughts that could constitute a novel, conventionally or nonconventionally, doesn't matter. You can't see it so I'll let you know that I am meditating and becoming a new character. Omm...

As always, I am like myself. I am a 47-year old man. I am...let's see. I don't have a regular mirror in front of me, only a small mirror that mounts on a computer monitor to show a person what's going on behind him. My skin droops off my face, with tiny folds of skin that show below my jaw when I turn my head.

I, as this new book character, have a set of friends, one group with children and one group without children. I have work colleagues with the same categories - DINKs and non-DINKs (Dual Income No Kids). I find out that some of my childless friends/colleagues chose their lives because they lead lives in which they don't want children to interfere. I am invited by those with interesting lives to join them. I accept their invitation.

The conflict? Some of their lives clash with the main character's set of beliefs. Some act as if their lives are interesting but they're completely boring to the main character. In other words, real life.

The hook that holds the readers' interest? Good question.

Some of the boring people's lives will include professional gambler, drug dealer, state politician, drag racer, and Internet scam artist. Some of the interesting people's lives will include housewife, accountant, waiter, toll booth operator, teacher, and midlevel manager. At the start of the story, some people from both groups will be sexual deviants, some will be celibate or lone masturbators, some will have severe psychological problems, and some will be as plain as water.

The story will be told from the perspective of a sexually communicable or transmitted disease (STD) but not in the sense of a voiceover or third party narrator. The STD will be the character who's not in the room, whose presence is told in hints, such as changes in people's behavior or physical appearance. Characters will have clashes with each other, not knowing that the real conflict between them is a microscopic organism that is simply trying to replicate itself.

Now you know my next story. I'll be a character in the novel but not the main character this time. I may or may not figure out who (or what) the main character is by the time is novel is over. I'm not even sure if I'll be one of the characters who dies or goes completely crazy along the way of the telling. But you'll be along for the ride. Starting with the next blog entry. Hope you enjoy it.