is a blog by Brendan
Tomorrow I am finally moving back to Centre. TOMORROW I am FINALLY moving BACK.
You can tell it’s serious because my computer is unplugged.
I’ve been wanting to go back for what seems like forever, and not just for broadband. Not much has happened, really, but this still feels like it’s been a summer of Homeric proportions. I don’t know, maybe we’re starting later than usual this year. I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way. Tomorrow I’m really a senior.
Today is my sister’s birthday! Caitlan is eighteen! Happy birthday, Caitlan!
In other news, Sumana has frequently plugged Bookfinder, a kickin’ service that, well, finds books. It’s kind of like the “network of bookstores” that Amazon uses to find out-of-print books, only much, much better. I was reading some of her comments on the service and how cool it was, and I kept thinking “gee, I wish I had a rare or used book that I was looking for.”
A couple days later, I was surprised to remember that I WAS looking for such a book, and had been for three years–Orson Scott Card’s short story omnibus, Maps In A Mirror. Bookfinder turned up several copies, all of which were too expensive at the moment, of course, but most of which were still cheaper than the few an Amazon search turned up two years ago.
So I went away satisfied, but came back tonight when I remembered a book that this amazing girl had showed me at a convention. The book is Anthropology, and it’s one of those forced-restriction masterpieces: 101 stories, each 101 words long. What I got to read of it was fantastic, and I wanted my own copy, but I remembered she’d said it was out of print.
Which it is–but tonight I found it for just ten bucks with shipping, and bought it. Thanks to Bookfinder! Hooray, Bookfinder!
Someday I will invent a tiny device that consists entirely of a wound radio antenna, a one-tone speaker, a battery, and some adhesive. I will then attach these devices to every single thing I own. When I’m done with that, I will assign each device a unique low-watt radio band all for itself, and put together a remote control that can broadcast on any of those bands. The remote will be voice-operated, and keyed to my voice, so that all I have to say is “where is my {stupid, fucking, blue} CD case?” and the device attached to that CD case sets off a furious beeping. Maybe THEN I won’t LOSE THINGS SO OFTEN.
(Hypothetical problem #1: What happens when I lose the remote? I guess I could create a secondary backup remote to find the first, but that way madness lies.)
Right now it’s showering sideways, and the wind is blowing so hard the water is going up the hill. Yesterday it was a lot harder. The picnic table almost flipped off the deck, and the first tree we planted when we moved here split. It’s not exactly down the middle, because the trunk is mostly intact, but about half the branches are sheared off in one big clump.
The tree looks lopsided now, of course. The other half is still lying on the ground on the lawn,and I keep looking at it like it’s an open wound. Which it is, I guess. I want to cut the dying part off and drag it behind the house, to patch up the torn part with tar, but it’s raining now and Mom says it’s going to die anyway.
I just finished The Bean Trees. I don’t go back to school until the 25th.
GSP is done as of twenty-eight hours ago; the post-GSP party/nap/wake for the RAs is done as of seven hours ago. It’ll be good to get some sleep,but of course I’m sad. This year I actually had some idea what I was doing, and with a couple notable exceptions I felt closer to all of my Scholars because of that. I miss them.
There are stories, the ones I couldn’t tell while things were in session because I was on the job. Now they can, in fact, be told, but I don’t currently have the strength for that much typing. I’ll get to it soon.
Meanwhile: I get to go see Angie!
I don’t really guess I’m qualified for this. But sometimes you have to write, and sometimes you have to speak for thedead.
I was in love with Alycia Smith for a long time. She knew it, and she teased me about it, and then she was in love with me for a while but nothing ever came of it except friendship, because that’s how things like that work out most of the time. We stopped talking as much after I graduated–I came here to Centre, and a year later she went to U of L. We saw each other at church sometimes, on weekends home.
Maybe a couple months ago, she IMed me again out of nowhere, and we talked and it was sweet and beautiful and we were starting to get to be good friends again. I missed talking to her in real life. I was looking forward to this summer,and maybe seeing her again.
You know this is coming by now, I guess. She drove over the median sometime yesterday, or last night, and ran head-o ninto another car. She, her boyfriend in the passenger seat and the other driver were all killed.
Alycia would hate reading this. She was a much better writer than me, and she wouldn’t stand for this kind of cliche. Especially the part where I tell you that it’s sitting on my brain now, like I think I’m going to wake up; where I tellyou that she was alive, more alive than anyone; where I tell you that she of all people…
She lived a little outside the lines. She wrote brilliant sad stuff that yes, was amateurish, but showed every sign of blossoming into real brilliant mature poetry and fiction. She drew pictures with the touchpad on her laptop. She had sex with more people than are usually in one bed at the same time.
She had beautiful long black hair that she cut to a bob after high school. I asked her to mail me a lock when I foundout she’d gotten rid of it all, and she promised she would. She never did. She loved manga and black and Poe and girls and boys and English. She sent me a bunch of naked pictures of herself the other day, half as a joke. She’s beautiful in every one of them.
She beat me out of a spot in the Governor’s School for the Arts once, and I was a little disappointed but mostly proud. I went to GSP instead of GSA, and we left around the same time, and while she was gone she started writing me letters–stories and jokes and cartoons and brilliance. I got them all in a box from my mom one day, and I sat in the library and read through them and could barely believe that people like her existed. That was four years ago, less one month.
Alycia didn’t really want to get old. I always hoped her life would outlast her lifestyle. It didn’t, and now the people who loved her have only who she was to love, and not who she would have been. I wish it were enough.
The first time I kissed her it was magic, real honest to God magic: starlight, and streetlight, and trees shaking their leftover rain down on us. Everyone on campus disappeared, and every car in the city stopped, and there wasn’t a sound except a little wind and the silver of her laugh.
There’s a wonderful little book I have called Rats Saw God. Everyone who was ever in high school should read it. It’s about relationships, and people, and love and being kids; one of the most resonant lines in it, for me, was “why ruin something so perfect by trying to make it last forever?”
The first time that question appears, it’s being asked of the protagonist; the second time, he’s asking it himself. I always thought I’d understand it if I had the chance. I think tonight I did.
Magic doesn’t last forever; it doesn’t last, period. I get that now. I’m glad I do. I’m glad I just had the only good breakup I’ve ever had, and that it wasn’t really a breakup at all, just an understanding.
I’m going to miss Emily a lot this summer, but that just means it’ll be even better when I see her again in the fall. And after all, why ruin something so perfect by trying to make it last forever?
Yesterday morning, my uncle John got up at some ridiculous hour and ran fifty kilometers. Fifty kilometers. Then he kept walking until he had done fifty miles. Then he went home, had something to eat and went to an unusual retrospective of his work.
Uncle John makes custom birthday cards, and has done so since he was a teenager. A few weeks ago, my aunt Dana started sending letters to friends and family asking to borrow any cards we might have saved. Of course, everybody had saved everything–you don’t get a personal work of art in the mail and throw it away when you’re done.
They got enough cards to fill four rooms full of shelves (and they had leftovers). During the day it was an exhibition for clients; that night, when I got there, it was food and a jazz band and my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party.
It was one of the best gallery shows I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of work and creativity and originality was humbling and inspiring and it still stuns me a little to think that I own at least a dozen of those original pieces myself.
I think it was my tenth birthday when I got the foldout card. It was a huge battle scene my uncle had drawn and then left half-empty, inviting me to fill in the rest. It was perfect. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I could probably redraw it from memory.
I was a weird little kid, and if I’d been born to different parents I probably would have been a Ritalin poster child.The only things that could get me to sit still for ten minutes were a big fat fantasy book or a chance to draw with my uncle. I didn’t quite get all the genes that give him his talent, or maybe his dedication–he did better stuff at fifteen than I can hope for now–but everything I love about sequential art comes from trading panels with him on “Captain Zero” and “The Adventures of Petey.” That this site exists as more than a blog is due to him.
A dozen cards, a million comic strips. Happy birthday, Uncle John, and thanks for all my presents.
Glorious, hellish, surprising, panicked, funny, awful, done. Except not really surprising at all. I’m starting to recognize that there’s a reason people rave about this kind of timed project–the artificial limits bring out ability you otherwise have no reason to use. Anyway, it was worth it, and this is what I got.
That’s there to read only if you’re well beyond “bored” into “catatonic.” This is not to say it wasn’t entertaining; I was lucky to be assigned an incredible director and a great cast who made the play into more than I could have hoped for.
There is a full account of the whole process that led to the play, but it’s freakishly long and boring. I wrote that and I’m keeping it for myself; I don’t recommend it for human consumption. I just wanted to have a good record by which to measure all future periods of stress (“Rescuing my pregnant sister from a burning house with my arm broken in three places? I give it .6 Playfests”).
Also, my stomach’s all better now.