My Irrepressible Shadow

I wrote a song tonight in honor of a fictional character. Well, that's not exactly true. Or at least, that's not the full of it. People do that all the time. Search YouTube for just a second and you know what I mean.

I wrote a song for a girl named Anastasia. You won't know Anastasia, at least not this particular girl named Anastasia, because she hasn't escaped from my head yet. She's been trying. She first slipped onto a piece of paper (technically, a computer document) almost precisely 12 years ago. She's been haunting me ever since.

The words are simple, and they're repeated often.

Verse:
She is there,
at the back of everything I think or do or say
She is there,
my irrepressible shadow
(repeat)

Chorus
Why do you do this to me,
my lovely golden girl?
Anastasia, my love, my only
Why do you do this to me,
my lovely golden girl?
You were a part of me,
the deepest part of me.

Bridge
But now you're gone...
You've gone away
And I'm a shell of the thing
that you were
that I was
standing here today

Reprised Verse
She was there
Do you know what it was that she was to me?
She was my
sense of adventure.
She was there
Do you know what it was that she was to me?
She was my love of life,
my sense of mystery and wonder

Reprised Chorus
Why do you do this to me,
my lovely golden girl?
Anastasia, my love, my only.
Why have you gone away, so it seems, never to return?
You were a part of me
The deepest part of me

Now you're gone...


Yeah... so that was the song. Didn't mean to lapse into it there, but it just sort of happened. The sad thing is, that doesn't do it justice. The melody is what makes it.

I was a little perturbed at first. I mean, look at the lyrics. There's this girl named Anastasia in my head, in my thoughts, she's basically been stalking me for 12 years. She's fictional, too, so there's the whole why-are-you-treating-this-figment-of-your-imagination-like-a-real-person thing.

Here's the answer: because she is a real person.

She is pretty much the person that I was when I was eleven years old: full of wonder, full of hope, full of the idea that the world actually had some mysterious potential. That line about "she was my sense of adventure." It's true! That first draft of Wishbook, the story and the world she belongs to... anybody reading it now wouldn't see what I see in it. I think it'd be like anybody looking at Niggle's painting of the tree (from Tolkien's short story "Leaf by Niggle"). When Niggle looks at the painting, it's this imperfect thing that will never truly capture the beautiful, perfect thing that's in his head. And I feel like anything I try to write to let Anastasia become a real person in a story of her own is going to be a bunch of painted leaves on a canvas, nothing more.

It's still sketchy, I guess, writing a song to a fictional character. Especially when I call her "my love, my only." But that's not a lie either. I loved those days when I saw adventure in the unlikeliest of places. I love the person I once was. And that person is my "only," the only thing I want to get back to.

So I wrote it like a love-lost song, but maybe it's a love-found song. Because the fact that she's resurrecting herself after so much time... she's been in hibernation these last few years, barely poking her head up, and when she did, it was never to impose herself and insist on being heard... she usually just let me squash her back into the boring, predictable shape my life takes now.

Anastasia, come back. I mean it. Insist on your story being heard, and maybe I'll finally get the guts to tell it.

Yet Another Poem

If shame had a name,
or evil a form,
it would sound like my syllable
and move like my shape.

And if hope had a tune
or goodness a gait
I’d be tone-deaf
and limping from place to place.

If the grave were a pillow
I’d rest my head,
and seek a better world
among the dead.

But I live and I ache
and I err and I take
and I make pointless blunder and wretched mistake
time and again, feeling hollow and fake,
till I wish either my heart or the whole world would break—

There is a void that stretches like a promise
where no one knows my shadow or my name.

Dan White

I've admitted some very terrible things in my life, sometimes in forums far more public than this. Still, I hesitated a little in writing this post. But the desire for catharsis won out over the desire for human decency.

Sometimes I think I understand what it's like to be Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk.

Isn't that horrible? What a horrible sentence. What a horrible human being.

This isn't about being gay, so don't go there for even a minute. This is about disliking someone, about not understanding why everybody likes them so much, about knowing you'd be unpopular if you expressed the way you really felt about them, about how they're managing to accomplish things and become this kind of figure you've secretly always wanted to be, and about how that doesn't seem fair, how you've always wanted it and worked for it and hoped for it, much longer and harder than they have probably, and how they don't even seem to try and it just happens to them, and you shake your head and say, "WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!?!?" all quizzical-like. It's about the anger and hurt and confusion and at the same time a sense of mesmerizing jealousy-mixed-with-utter-loathing that has you almost obsessed with them in some weird kind of way. It's about this mixture of emotions that would lead someone to do something stupid. In my case, I can't say the person I feel this way about has anything to worry about life-wise. I've only ever touched a BB gun. I hate violence, and I used to be able to say with some conviction that I hate hate. Now, though...

Now that I find myself capable of writing such statements as the one I wrote above, how can I be sure?

I don't want to hurt this person. In fact, I wish them well. The thing they have is something I used to be obsessed with wanting. Now I've come to realize that it's really not good for me at all. So in a way, I don't envy them. I just shake my head and wonder what it is that everyone else sees in them. How can everyone NOT see the annoying way they seem to turn the conversation so it ends up going away from what you were talking about and toward whatever it is that they're currently thinking? How can people find ENDEARING the way they so casually talk to you like you're smaller or less significant than them somehow, in the unconsciously didactic way adults usually talk to children? Or maybe they don't do that to everyone. Maybe they do that to me because they sense in me something everyone else can see except me. Maybe I am stupid and childlike and not capable of dealing with the grown-up conversation, maybe I've been relegated to the child's table at dinner this whole time without even knowing it.

This is a post about hate, I guess, but it's also a post about justice. Because the world isn't just, and the scales are never balanced, and they swing to and fro all the time.

Maybe this is her time, and maybe this is not mine. Maybe I will never have a time.

I am not Dan White, but I have felt what he felt. It's how I choose to respond to those feelings that makes all the difference.

On Magic Wands

I bought a fancy wand when I already had a wand. It was a wooden dowel from Wal-Mart which I cut and whittled smooth. I bought a woodstain pen in the right hue and stained it a beautiful ash. It's plain, untapered, and the ends aren't perfect, but it's the right length and it weighs well in my hand and it's mine. It's always been mine.

But I was in the merch room and they had these fancy wands out, with tapered ends and special braided-twine grips and one of those felt pretty good in my hand, so I bought it. Packing to come home, though, I laid it on the bed, forgot, and sat on it. It snapped in two.

I have an ordinary wand and a broken fancy wand, and yet I've never had magic. Not then and not now. Never, really.

I don't know why this makes me so sad.

Where the Wild Things Are: My Take On the Film

I saw the "Where the Wild Things Are" film today, and it was... ___________. I mean, how do you really fill in that blank? I think it's actually a great thing, a testament to the filmmakers, that I can't leap in and say, "it was fantastic" or "it was scary" or "it was different" or weird or depressing or enlightening, etc, etc. It wasn't exactly how I'd imagined it, but as I was trying to explain to my mystified father, that was a lot of the appeal of the original book: it's a spare story, without a whole lot of words, and as a result a lot of the story takes place beyond the edges of the page, in the imagination of the reader. That's one of the strengths of the movie, that it goes in there and it fills in some of the pieces, but obviously those aren't going to match everything I've carried around inside my head since I was five years old and first read it.

This is a film about being a child. Max is, of course, the central child, but I would argue that the Wild Things are more children than he is: Carol's frustrations, fears, and angry outbursts, Alexander feeling like no one ever hears him, all of the Wild Things in their quest for approval or attention - they are a (literally) super-sized depiction of the same feelings and situations Max faces. When the dirt fight dissolves into a petty argument, hurt feelings, and taking sides, I was reminded of many a similar playground battle. Some people in reviews have slammed the film as being too "depressing," but I think it's just a problem of preconceived notions. Yes, the Wild Things in the book seem to have a jolly good time on their rumpus, but on the whole they are needy creatures who latch on instantly to this new authority figure, and who are beside themselves with grief when he wants to leave (to the point that "we'll eat you up, we love you so"). Jonze and Eggers took the implied sadness (and sadness is something a child is capable of feeling quite strongly) and brought it to full fruition on screen.

But it's not only this emotional aspect that rings true to what it's like to be a kid. Even elements of the plot seem like they came from the mind of a child: a scene in which Max crawls (whole and unharmed) into KW's stomach to hide from an enraged Carol, only to find a live raccoon inside busy snacking on something and as happy as can be. Or how KW's new friends are two owls named Bob and Ted who speak in hoots that everyone seems to understand except Max and Carol. Or even the slightly disturbing sight of Carol ripping off Alexander's arm in the midst of an argument, only to have Alexander replace it in a later shot with a stick (as weird as it sounds, this is definitely the kind of thing a kid would think up!). It doesn't make sense logically, but it makes sense emotionally, which is a lot of how we perceive the world as a child.

The other thing I loved about this movie is how DANGEROUS it is. The creative urge is to build things, and Max and Co. do plenty of this, but they also have soooooo much fun knocking things down and tearing things up. When Max first meets the Wild Things, Carol is in the process of ripping their huts into shreds in the midst of an angry tantrum. There are other scenes that involve taking hunks out of trees or knocking them down completely, dancing in the wreckage, glorying in the destruction. Someone gets their arm ripped off. Max's crown and scepter are dug up from a pile of the bones of former "kings". Dirt battles and wild rumpuses and sleeping in one giant pile (when you're the tiny one among huge monsters) - Max is always on the edge of real peril. He gets dirty, hurt, tired, and often risks his life. Even a seemingly innocent scene where he stands up on a cliff top overlooking his "kingdom" nearly becomes a disaster when a Wild Thing rushes up behind him almost upsetting his balance and sending him hurtling over the edge.

And far from being disturbing, I thought: HOW WONDERFUL. There is a beautiful and astounding line where Carol is trying to express his frustration to Max and says, "Do you know how it feels when you keep losing your teeth, and you notice them getting farther apart, until they all fall out and you just don't have teeth anymore?" I think this is what happens to us when we grow up: our imaginations, our minds, lose their "teeth," lose that danger, that edge. We stop thinking of the world as a big and scary place; we lose that sense of danger and wonder little by little until it's completely gone. If you think about it, we really don't have to "lose our teeth"; we just let it happen. If we want, we can fight for them, keep a little sharpness in our bite.

Parents who try to ban books are the sort of people who think children need to be shielded or protected from the horrors of the world, but what this film (and the book that inspired it) shows more than anything is that there is a landscape of terror, violence, anger, sadness, wonder, beauty, and joy inside each child. You can't censor your children's nightmares; you can't take a child's imagination off the shelf. Kids feel real feelings and struggle with real issues and are exposed to real dangers and unsettling situations. Rather than being the kind of person who would take this away - who would hide the boat or burn the wolf suit or send Max to a shrink to squelch his "unhealthy fantasies" - I hope more and more people will choose to be like Max's mom. Maybe you can't shield your child from everything, but you can always be there with huge hug and warm meal at the end of the day.

So in conclusion, I thought "Wild Things" was ___________. It's too big for pages, too big for screens, too big for words. It is a story that will always exist outside the edges of things, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Finally, A Little Bit of Wisdom Seeps Into This Jack-O-Lantern Brain

Do you know how sometimes you forget the obvious things, the things that stare you right in the face?

I used to think life was a continuous string of boxes, and once you reach the end of one box, you lift a flap and shimmy on into another. The box of "childhood" might lead to "high school" then "college" then "job." And I assumed "spouse" and "family" boxes came soon afterward.

Now I know better. Life isn't boxes, it's just one damn thing after another. Some of it makes sense, but you're lucky if even one piece fits into place. Most of the time it's a collage of crazy swirling randomness, a fist-on-the-keyboard gut-wrench of notes that still somehow comes out sounding like a tune if you play it right.

I'm a good liar. A fucking great liar. And that's because I'm a good storyteller. Problem is, I forget sometimes that my life is life, a big hodge-podge, never-fully-in-my-control kind of thing. I get into a jam or reach a plateau and think, "How can I write my way out of this one?" What do we have, character-wise? A 23-year-old with no sense of direction who's sick of being asked what she's going to do with her life. What about backstory? Oh, she likes books? Let's make her a librarian then. Kind of a lousy job at creative writing. A good creative writer would know never to go with the obvious. Just because she likes books doesn't mean she wants to spend her time reshelving them. Maybe she wants to fill her days doing the kind of thing that inspires books. What that thing is, that's anybody's guess, but I should know better... I'd get yelled at by my peers if I underestimated my character, if I didn't give her enough depth, a chance to grow or change or show she's something more. So why the hell do I do that to myself?

After this semester, it's no more library school for me. I want to move to a new city, try a new thing. I don't know where, or what, or even why, but I want to get some guts. I want to up and leave this town. It's about damn time.

October

October, October...
It has arrived
And I'm so happy
to be alive!

Autumn creeps in
with a change on the wind
October, October,
when magic begins.