Accidental Historian

This is what it means to say Madison, Wisconsin

The last time I was on I-88 I was on my way back from college.

Actually, that might not be true.  I think I’ve been on I-88 several times since then.  But the last time I was on I-88 any farther west than the far west suburbs of Chicago was certainly on a return trip from college.  It simply hasn’t been necessary for me to go any farther since then.  Until today.

Today I’m going to Madison, Wisconsin, also known as my second-favorite Midwestern city.[1]  Specifically, I’m going to the world famous High Noon Saloon in Madison, Wisconsin to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.  The last time I was in Madison was to see Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers at the world famous High Noon Saloon.

That was October of 2009.  That was a lifetime ago.

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The parallels are eerie.  The first couple times I went to Madison it was just Madison.  But now Madison reminds me of Oklahoma City, another state capitol in which I’ve seen RCPM.  Specifically, I’ve seen them at the Wormy Dog Saloon in Oklahoma City, which reminds me of the High Noon Saloon.

The first time I saw RCPM at the Wormy Dog their opening act was Sons of Bill, who just so happen to be the openers tonight.  They were also the last band I saw in Ft. Worth, at a venue called Moon Bar, right next door to the Aardvark, where I once saw RCPM.  Moon Bar, in turn, is a block away from University Drive, right next to the original Fuzzy’s Taco Shop.

One of the reasons I’m excited to go to Madison is because there’s a Fuzzy’s Taco Shop on University Drive.

Oh, and that night at Moon Bar?  I saw another band called the Wheeler Brothers, who were also in Chicago right after I moved back.

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Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah, I-88.  I’ve driven down I-88 a whole shitload of times.  But I’ve never driven it in my 2010 Mazda6.  That was a Texas addition.  I’ve also never driven it while wearing the Lost Immigrants’ confused llama.  That’s a Texas thing, too.

Did I mention I was wearing this same shirt at Love & War in Grapevine the last time I saw RCPM?  Did I mention that Roger fucking Clyne said it was a cool shirt?  Okay, just checking.

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I remember I-88.  It’s familiar, even if everything is different.

That brings up an interesting point.  Did you know that we don’t actually notice everything?  Our brains are actually surprisingly lazy.  They fill most things in from memory.  So you’re not actually seeing your home, your car, your best friend, your spouse.  You’re actually seeing a memory of that person.  You’re not actually driving to work down a road.  You’re driving the memory of that road.

It’s how it’s so easy to zone out, to get to work and think, “Wait.  How did I get here?”

I’ll bet that’s why things remind us of other things, too.  I’ll bet that’s why I walked in to the Wormy Dog Saloon in Oklahoma City and thought, “Wow, it’s like I’m back at the High Noon Saloon.”  My brain was trying to fill in the space with the closest memories I had.

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I think that about half of my drives to and from Macomb, IL on I-88 came during my last semester out there.  That was also known as the semester when I thought I had a thing going with Her.  So every couple Fridays I drove back to Chicago in my little blue Chevy Cavalier.  Every couple Sundays I drove back from Chicago in my little blue Chevy Cavalier, too.

In the time after we broke everything off I thought of her as a ghost, haunting my memories.  It was like I could see her in all the places we’d been before.  It’s why I was so surprised to not even recognize her when I saw her in the grocery store a couple weeks ago.

But now I understand.

Back then my brain was still trying to put her in the places she belonged.  Back then my brain was still trying to remember her.  Back then she was a ghost, a pale, translucent vision haunting the dusty corners of my mind.

Now she’s a stranger.  To me and my memory.  She is right where she belongs.

Living her own life.

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I am a grave robber.

I am a cannibal.

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There was a time when those memories seemed so important.  There was a time when I dredged them up just to keep them alive, just to make sure they mattered.  There was a time I fixated upon them, choosing to remember them in the hopes they wouldn’t fade away.  Choosing to remember them so my brain kept trying to paint her in to the picture wherever I went.

My memory now is perverse, corrupted.  My memory is dead and buried.

But I dig it up anyway.

I dig it up for shits and giggles.

I dig the bones of my memories up to gnaw on them so I have something to write about.

I disturb them even though they no longer want to disturb me.  It’s a sickness, I suppose, being a writer.

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I’m on a road trip.  That means I need the definitive road trip music: Cross Canadian Ragweed’s Back to Tulsa: Live and Loud at Cain’s Ballroom.

Every time I drove across Oklahoma I blasted that album.  Every time but twice: the first time I drove to Dallas because I hadn’t yet realized that it was the definitive road trip album and the last time I drove from Dallas because I couldn’t play stuff from my mp3 player in my rented truck.

As it turns out, Cross Canadian Ragweed broke up last year.  I learned about it on Facebook.  Whoever was in charge of RCPM’s wall posted it while I was on my way back from seeing RCPM at the Wormy Dog Saloon.

Cross Canadian Ragweed sounds different in northern Illinois than it does in Oklahoma.  I can’t explain it, but they do.

Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, though.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth?

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[1]Those who know anything about traveling from Chicago to Madison are probably wondering at this.  I-90 is, after all, the more direct route to Madison.  But I was warned of construction.  And it’s actually a much bigger PITA to get from my parents’ house to I-90 than I-88, so the extra 19 miles actually only adds about 8 minutes to the trip.

On the Subject of Everlasting Shame

It started innocently enough.  I was curious.  More bored, really.  I just needed something to pass the time, an excuse to get out of the house.  I knew other people who were doing or had done it, so it seemed safe.

Still, I was worried.  I didn’t want anyone to know I was doing it.  The whole thing was, well, shameful, I guess.  It wasn’t the sort of thing that people admitted to in polite company.

It didn’t really take up much time at first, nor did it take much effort.  That’s how they getcha, I guess.  They draw you in.  I quick hit here, a wasted minute there.  Eventually, though, it took over my life.  I thought about it in the morning when I woke up and again at night before I went to bed and at many points in between.  I started searching for new and better ways to get my fix.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t actually having any fun and wasn’t actually getting anything out of it.  But even at that I was wasting time that would have been better spent without knowing why.  Worse, I was starting to do it in public, too, desperately trying to make sure that no one saw me.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to dealing with it.  So here goes:

I…

(Fuck, man, I can’t do this.  No.  Be strong.  You’ll get through this.)

I…

(Deep breath.)

I am an…

(Oh, god, it’s harder than I thought.)

I have engaged in activity related to internet dating.

There.  I said it.  It’s out there for all the world (or, y’know, twelve people who read this blog, some of whom know that already) to see.

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Okay, so in all seriousness, there’s a question that I started wrestling with about a year after I graduated from Western Illinois University.  At the time I was twenty-six, working a dead-end job, and in the process of pulling away from the whole church thing.  It was beginning to occur to me that I had no clue how to make new friends in this weird adult world.

Then I lost my dead-end job.  And things ended with the one called Her.  Y’know, they ended officially and with prejudice, as opposed to the kinda-sorta unofficial end of fifteen months or so prior.  But the thing was that I’d had a good year or so to use her as a crutch and keep myself from having to think about friends and girlfriends and a life after church and school made some of that stuff more-or-less automatic.

I had one shot at something right after that stuff ended, but I blew it without even realizing that I was blowing it (as opposed to now, when I blow it intentionally and for the lulz, but we’ll get back to that).  So I figured I should figure out some way to practice dating.  I thought, “Hey, the internet!”  I suppose it helps that I’d just been Best Man at a wedding that was facilitated by a meeting on Match.com when I made that choice.

Thus began the online dating adventures of me, the least-equipped guy in the world when it comes to dating.  Or going on dates.  Or having conversations, really.  Basically, I’m a giant mess.

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I suppose we need some background for that.

I am, shall we say, socially awkward.  Growing up I was the fat kid who got picked on and never felt like he really belonged.  So I did what the outcast does in situations like that: I tried way, WAY too hard to make up for it and went way over to annoying and loud and totally not on the same social wavelength as the rest of the…universe.

I never really outgrew my inner fat kid.  I remain socially awkward, but now it’s usually more of a cultivated, intentional thing.  I don’t want to deal with people at least 75% of the time and the easiest way to get rid of other people is to come off as an asshole or someone who is really weird.  I can do both.  Asshole is the easier of the two, but weird is an art form.  And it amuses me, so there’s a bonus.

There’s a trick to weird.  You don’t want to just show up, crap your pants, and ask your date if she’s willing to change your diaper.  You don’t want to start talking about your collection of left arms from 1980s action figures.  At that point you’re just trying way too hard to come off weird.  Or serial killer-y.  And you might run in to someone who has a diaper and scat fetish and find yourself having freaky first-date sex.  And I don’t mean freaky like Rick James freaky.  I mean freaky like, “Why the hell would anyone find that arousing?” freaky.[1]

I do weird by channeling my inner fat-kid-who-tries-too-hard.  See, back in the day I used to try really, really hard to get people to like me by being the funny guy.  But I have a rather twisted sense of humor.  Not in the, “I find death hilarious,” sort of twisted way, but in the, “I find wordplay based on homonyms of archaic uses of common English words hilarious.”  Quite frankly, most people are more put off by esoteric wordplay than dead baby jokes.  I don’t know why.  But I’m okay with that.  Because I can totally use it to my benefit.

Online dating gave me a whole new test audience for my complete and utter bullshit.  It was brilliant, really.  But there was always the possibility that I’d run in to someone with whom I was compatible[2] and I wouldn’t want to actually alienate her.  I mean, it’s also possible I’ll find the TARDIS in my front yard tomorrow, but we can all imagine for a moment.[3]

So about half of the conversations I have with people where I’m not just trying to asshole them away become a game.  Specifically, a game of, “How long can I go before this person looks at me like I’m completely bugnuts?”  For me that’s a win-win.  If they are also amused, then I get to have a random conversation.  If they are not amused, then I get to go home and watch TV or read a book or something.

Either way, there’s a reason why I don’t go on too many second dates.  Or first dates.

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Oddly, my social awkwardness isn’t my only major obstacle.  It might not even be the main obstacle, compared to my other problem.

It simply does not occur to me that a woman could find me attractive.  This might sound like some sort of compliment-fishing sort of thing, but it’s not.  I don’t pick up on signals more subtle than walking up to me and saying, “Hi, I find you really attractive.”  In the absence of such signals I assume there’s no interest.

Now, you might think this isn’t a problem with the internet thing.  After all, you’re on the site for the same reason and agreed to go out because of said reason, right?  You’ve obviously never met me.

If I’m not into it whilst on a date, I work with the assumption that it means she’s not into it, either.  I mean, duh.  In general, though, if you’re doing the internet thing there has been some communication, so she probably is into me going into the date.  This never occurs to me.  Ever.

Did I mention I’m fairly dense?  Well, I am.  Allow me to explain.

Last October-ish I went on a date.  From my perspective, the date was something between a train wreck and a waste of time.  It started with her suggesting that we go for pizza in a misguided attempt to prove that Dallas was capable of making pizza a Chicagoan would eat.  We went to some place somewhere I’d never been that served an extremely crispy thin crust pizza I compared to nachos.  Bad start.

We were at the pizza place for a while whilst I pretty much ran through my entire bag of tricks.  By which I mean, “I said awkward shit for my own amusement, I played the ‘Way too Honest’ card, and I started at least one argument.  About the nature of atheism, as I recall.”  It was a decent enough conversation and she obviously hadn’t had enough of it yet, so we went to a bar.

A gay bar.  Where I met her gay (male) friend and her lesbian sister.  That was, by far, the most interesting part of my night.  The bit where no matter where I was I could turn around and see two dudes making out (and the same two dudes, it was like they were following us around or something) was deeply amusing.

Mr. Gay Best Friend was pining over lost love.  I found that cathartic in an odd way, so I’m reasonably certain I spent more time talking to him than the person I was ostensibly on a date with during that part of the night.  And after all was said and done I assumed that would be the end of that.

Until she begged me for a second date via text message.  I had no idea what to do with this turn of events.[4]  So I probably passive-aggressived[5] my way through it based on the theory that people hate it when other people are passive-aggressive jackwagons.  I didn’t hear from her for a month.  Then she stalked me down on Facebook[6] and proceeded to try the “let’s be friends” routine.

I was feeling charitable, so rather than just ignoring her I decided to at least try to be nice about it.  So I responded and said that I’d been in that position before, so I knew it would only end in pain and resentment.  She then tried to amateur psychoanalyze me and told me that I was letting my past pain get in the way of my future happiness and I should give her a chance to help me be happy.

That was when I went back to Plan A: back slowly away, then turn and run like hell.

And that’s not the worst of it.

About a month ago I was telling someone random stories of my stupid dating experiences and my dating stupidity.  All of the sudden I remembered that I had been on a date once where the girl had insisted on texting me a topless picture she took of herself with her camera phone.  Then I remembered it was the gay bar date.  So, yes, there was an incident involving the transmission of topless pictures that was so completely not interesting to me that I forgot about it for nearly a year.

Now, to be fair, the picture was poorly lit and on a super-low-quality camera phone.  And she initiated the whole affair over my objections (it pretty much went, “Wanna see a topless picture I took of myself on my camera phone?”  “Not really.”  “Well I’m sending one to you, anyway.”  “Huh.  So there we are.”  “You don’t like it?”  “There’s nothing to see here.”  “Well then delete it.”  “Okay.”  ::Delete::[7])

Now where was I going with this?  Oh, yeah, subtle clues: I don’t pick up on them.  Also, non-subtle clues: I don’t pick up on them.

Also, too, I will never get laid.  Apparently even the internet cannot help me with that.  But at least I can now speak openly about internet dating.  Because I have many thoughts on the subject and I know y’all are just dying to hear my insights, since I’m obviously a modern day Don Fucking Juan.

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[1]So, the internet.  Weird place.  I know so little about sex from personal experience that I can’t help but assume that I’m extremely vanilla in my tastes.  Yet I know about all kinds of freaky shit that gets people off and I don’t know why.  I mean, I came up with the diaper thing on the spur of the moment, then I was like, “Oh, shit, some people are in to that.  What the fuck?”

[2]As long as she wasn’t an uggo.  My heart hates uggos.

[3]So how cool would that be?  Except for the bit where the Companion is generally a woman and I’m definitely not a Time Lord.  So that’s potentially awkward.  And I’d definitely be a ratings sink compared to Karen Gillan.

[4]Turns out that, “Assume she’ll never want to see you again and get the fuck on with your life,” is a post-first-date strategy with a shockingly obvious flaw.

[5]It’s a verb now.  Because shut up, that’s why.

[6]Geds’ Official Rules of Dating:

1.  Don’t Date
2.  Don’t Date Co-Workers
3.  Don’t Give a Last Name Until the Third Date
4.  Don’t Give an Address Until the Fifth Date

Now, you’d think that Rule 1 would really work for on its own.  But obviously it doesn’t.  So I needed to come up with less catch-all rules.

[7]Man, I am an asshole.  I mean, seriously.  I am a horrible person.

A New Day Has Begun

And you can’t keep life from moving on
So roll along ‘til there’s nowhere to go
And you can’t get back from moving on
So roll along ‘til there’s nowhere to go
Nowhere to go
--Roddy Woomble, “Roll Along”[1]

I used to drive endlessly in circles.

I think I was searching for peace.  Or answers.  I’d head west from home and drive a specific circuit.  Sometimes I’d add to that circuit.  But it was always a variation on a theme of driving alone out west, then heading back.

It was so ingrained that I took the circuit a couple times when I was visiting from Dallas.

I’ve started to take it a couple times since I moved back.  Both times I got bored, took a left when I should have taken a right, then headed back.  The whole thing just wasn’t worth the effort.

But you keep asking the same questions
About the nature of time
But they take far too long to answer
Why don’t we just go outside?
--Roddy Woomble, “Roll Along”

I suppose it was inevitable.  I moved back from being a thousand miles away, after all.  Not only that, but I moved back in with my parents whilst searching for a house.

I knew it was only a matter of time before one of my ghosts caught up.

I was standing in line at the grocery store, waiting for the guy to ring me up.  Across the way I saw a woman who looked vaguely familiar.  For the life of me I could not figure out who it was or why I thought I should know her.

I gave up trying to figure that one out.  My eyes scanned to my left and I saw another, younger woman standing behind her.  She looked familiar, too.  She was also looking directly at me.  So I did what I do in that situation and gave her a brief nod of acknowledgment.  She immediately looked down at the floor and took a half step back, as if to take cover behind a display of granola bars and chocolate-covered pretzels.

That was when I realized two things.  First, the second woman was none other than Her.  Second, I’d totally forgotten what she looked like.

With that, I paid for my groceries, walked out to my car, and drove home.  It occurred to me that my ghosts can’t really scare me anymore, not if I’ve forgotten what they look like.  It further occurred to me that at least one of those ghosts is more scared of me than I of her.

I think that in the past such a moment would have driven me to drive my old route.

Today I went home and took my dog for a walk.[2]

Abandon your traditions
Watch them disappear one by one
And follow their direction
Between the moon and the sun
A new day has begun
--Roddy Woomble, “A New Day Has Begun”

I guess there’s no real point to this story.  I want to say something profound, spin it off in to a tale of growing past and moving on.  But there is no real tale as such.

There’s just a single moment.

On one side of that moment I’m still trapped by my past.  On the other side of that moment I’m not.  I think that’s really where the old idea that time heals all wounds comes in.  One day it still hurts.  The next day you’re wondering if you can make it.  The next day you realize that it just doesn’t matter anymore.

And I might be down in Georgia
Driving down an old dirt road
Or southern California driving up the coast
Well I don’t know exactly where I’ll be
When you turn in to a memory
--Jessi Lynn, “Someday Soon”

Maybe, though, there is something more to it.

I think all those years that I drove in circles I was attempting to run away and always finding myself right back where I started.  Even the Dallas move couldn’t necessarily help.  I’ve always said that all the unresolved issues you want to escape by leaving are the first thing that goes in the suitcase (which, I guess, is why they call it “baggage”).

I mean, I suppose the fact that I haven’t really thought about her much over the last year or so probably counts for a lot.  But I don’t think I could have known what that meant until that moment when I realized she was standing right there, looking at me, and I didn’t actually know who she was.  In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean much, I guess.  The only real difference between the moment before and the moment after was that before I suspected and after I knew.

But, really, that seems like a good thing.

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[1]This is off of Roddy Woomble’s new solo effort, The Impossible Song and Other Songs.  As an avowed fan of all things Idlewild, his previous solo effort, and most of the side project he did a couple years ago, I can say this: it’s bloody brilliant.  At this point my 1-2-3 for 2011 seems to be holding at Roddy Woomble, Matt Nathanson, and Flogging Molly.  And this is a year where Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers (my one-syllable review: meh) and Over the Rhine (my three word review: solid but pedestrian) released albums.  Oh, yeah, and some guy named Paul Simon did, too.

Actually, 2011 is an embarrassment of riches for music in the same way that 2010 was an embarrassment.  My 2011 list thus far:

1.  Roddy Woomble, The Impossible Song and Other Songs
2.  Matt Nathanson, Modern Love
3.  Flogging Molly, Speed of Darkness
4.  The Wheeler Brothers, Portraits
5.  Social Distortion, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes
6.  Over the Rhine, The Long Surrender
7.  Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Unida Cantina
8.  Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What
9.  Foo Fighters, Wasting Light (provisional, I just got it, will climb, possibly on “Dear Rosemary” alone)
10.  Blue October, Any Man In America (will most likely not make the top 10)

So, here’s the thing: this is a hell of a list.  The OtR and RCPM offerings are weak, but they’re legitimately worthwhile (of course, that’s “worthwhile compared to other things.  Both bands have at least three albums I’d rather listen to before their 2011 offerings.  Same with Paul Simon) and I love the Top 5 (also, if you get the chance go see the Wheeler Brothers.  They’re a hell of a live band.  I first saw them with Sons of Bill at Moon Bar in Ft Worth, then they had their first-ever Chicago show right after I moved back.  Portraits is one of those albums that’s actually kinda meh in album form, but everything on it kicks ass live).  But 2011 is far from over.  I just discovered that Cody Canada (as in, the Canadian in Cross Canadian Ragweed) & the Departed released their debut album, This is Indian Land, in June.  As we speak an autographed copy of the new Mike Doughty album, Yes and Also Yes is making its way towards me through the mail.  The new Micky & the Motorcars, Raise My Glass is decent.  I’ve got a pre-order on the new Waterboys.  I have it on good authority that James Dunning is in the studio right now with whoever the hell else is in the Lost Immigrants these days.  There’s still the promise of a new Local H album.  It’s also still somewhere between possible and likely there will be new Sons of Bill and Seneca.

And…I feel like I’m forgetting one other promised new album…

Oh, yeah, there’s one super-forgettable band that’s said there will be a 2011 release.

Soundgarden.

[2]In the interests of full disclosure, I also have a goal of not buying gas during the month of August.  That might have messed up my plans…

Also, I feel like telling Daisy stories.

One of the neighbors up the street left a couch out on the curb yesterday.  Last night I was walking Daisy and she started wagging her tail pretty hard at the couch and sniffing around it.  Finally, she jumped up on it and was all, “Yeah, check it out, a new toy for me to play on!”  I found this somewhere between amusing and amusing as all hell.

Also, while I was walking her this afternoon we walked past a white dog that was about twice the size of Daisy.  Said other dog had a leash, but no one was holding it.  As soon as the owner saw me and Daisy he ran over and grabbed the leash.  Daisy ignored the other dog, but it barked away at her.  On the way back I saw the same dog, again being ignored by its people.  It was also walking around with a tree branch in its mouth that was about four or five feet long and probably at least six inches around.  Daisy, once again, did not do anything to piss that dog off.  She’s a smart puppy.

Neverwhere

I see him every morning on the west end of the Randolph Street Bridge.  I can’t say much about him, except that he’s black and if he’s younger than forty his years dragged him down hard. He huddles against the metal upright holding out a white cup and spouting gibberish at passersby.  At least, it always seems like gibberish.  Every once in a while I see someone stopped, exchanging a few words with him.  They drop some money in his cup.

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It turns out there’s an unexpected downside to working in the city.

Offices in the suburbs are fortresses of privilege, surrounded by vast, asphalt moats.  I’d get up in the morning, get in to my car, and drive from my suburban sanctity to my suburban sanctuary.  Every once in a while I’d take a train in to the city, but it was a special event. 

I used to keep a few dollars free in my pocket so I could hand something to the homeless people I’d see.  It seemed like the right thing to do, even if it wasn’t much.

Over the past year and a half I almost never saw any homeless.  I got off the freeway in Ft Worth once and saw a bunch of guys sitting around beneath the big, concrete pillars.  I saw the occasional panhandler at the intersections.  But Dallas was always passing behind me at 60 miles per hour.

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“Sell you a card with seventy-five cents on it for fifty?”

The offer makes no sense.  “No, thanks,” I reply, turning.

The man is old, thin.  “Okay,” he says, then, “Excuse me.”  He shuffles past me, runs his hand along the change tray in the CTA card machine.  Then he walks off.

I head through the turnstile.  Only then does it occur to me what has just happened and why.  The $40 in my wallet that I’d just pulled out of an ATM and put next to the $19 that was already there suddenly get heavier.  I briefly consider turning around, finding the man and handing him some money.  Then it occurs to me that I have no idea what he looks like.

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It amazes me, really, how quickly the homeless people I see every day have become, if not invisible, simple background.  It’s the West Loop.  There are four things on every block: a Corner Bakery Café, a Dunkin Donuts, a Walgreen’s, and homeless people.  One is no more remarkable than the others, really.

I suppose that part of it is that they seem to show up in the same place at the same time every day.

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He isn’t there in the mornings when I go in, but he’s always there in the evenings as I walk out of my building.  He’s an older man dressed in business casual, standing in front of the stoplight, holding up a Streetwise.[1]

He wasn’t there the last couple days.  I wonder what happened.

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I lost all respect for Dick Durbin in the space of about two minutes.

For those who don’t know, Durbin is Illinois’ senior Senator.  He’s a Democrat and a member of the “Gang of Six” that was doing the Senate’s dirty work over the course of the budget ceiling non crisis/hostage negotiation.  He’s also, traditionally, seemed to at least try to be a genuine progressive and has usually sided with the good guys on social issues.

The day after the budget deal was reached he talked to the morning guy on WGN.

“This budget deal won’t affect people like you and me,” he said to the host.[2]  “It will affect children who are getting public aid to go to school.  It will affect people who can’t afford health care.”

I was ready for a little speechifying then.  A little rallying to the flag.  A little, “We lost this round, but we’ll keep up the fight.”

“But this is how it has to be.  We’ve been living beyond our means for too long and simply can’t afford to do it anymore.  We have to make some choices.”

I don’t know if Durbin actually believed that, but I do know that he didn’t sound like he was trying too hard to convince himself that he’d been in the right.

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“Spare any change guys?”

He sits on the corner by my office during the day.  I pretty much have to walk past him if I want to get anywhere east of my building.  Several oxygen tanks are strapped to the back of his wheelchair, but he never seems to use them.

“You know the guy who sits out on the wheelchair?” one of my co-workers asked, “[Somebody][3] said she saw him standing up the other day.”

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Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere takes place in “London Below,” an entire society of the homeless that exists parallel to, but unseen by, the citizens of regular London.  Unless something extraordinary happens to bridge the gap, this entire world is literally invisible to the non-homeless.  The citizens of that lower realm live and have adventures and while London Below seems odd and dangerous, it also seems interesting and not particularly bad.

I’ve never seen the TV show, but the book is written in Gaiman’s inimitable magical realism.  The world of fantasy exists side by side with cold, hard reality.

I think Gaiman got it right.  Homelessness really is a place where reality and fantasy collide.  In Chicago's version of London Below the homeless really are invisible.  The bit where everything works out – somehow – behind the scenes, though, that’s the fantasy.

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He stands at the east end of the Randolph Street Bridge in the mornings, holding up a sign that says he needs money to feed his family.  Most of the time he doesn’t make eye contact with passersby.  He’s too busy texting on his cell phone.

------------------------------

I don’t know when we lost our way.

But I am pretty sure I can tell you when we lost our shame.  I can tell you when we sold our souls.  I never personally witnessed it, as I was a child at the time and such a thing would have passed right over my head.  Hell, I might not have even been born yet the first time it came up.  I’ve certainly heard about it plenty as I’ve gotten older, though.

Ronald Reagan used to tell a story about a beggar woman who would get in to a chauffeured Cadillac and go home at the end of the day.  Since then, I think, we’ve gone from a society that thinks the poor deserves their fate because of what they’ve done to become poor to a society that actively hates and distrusts the poor.  Reagan’s story of that beggar and her Cadillac colors every interaction those of us with jobs and clean clothes and Mazdas and monthly Metra passes that take us from clean offices in the business district to suburban homes with deadbolt locks on the door.

Workers in new suits and new shoes walk over hungry people on the sidewalk who are desperate for something, anything, to pay $12 for the privilege of trying the new organic Asian fusion restaurant.  And those workers have the audacity to be angry at the poor.  Because that story that a former President told so many times didn’t just give us a narrative.  It gave us permission.

That, I think, is why the current crop of deranged conservatives loves St. Reagan so.  It’s not that they love him for espousing the same values they do.  He didn’t.[4]  He gave them a narrative that allowed them to be shallow and nasty and feel self-righteous in their hatred of people who dared to remind them that world is not, in fact, a nice place for everyone.

I suppose, deep down, in refusing to be invisible the homeless remind those angry, irrationally resentful people that it could happen to them next.

------------------------------

He slumps against a pillar outside Ogilvie.  His sign says that he just needs $40 for his medication.

------------------------------

I pass them by, armored against their intrusion on my commute by mirror sunglasses and earbud headphones.

Still, I wonder if I could do it.  If my world comes crashing down tomorrow could I bring myself to hold out a cup, ask a stranger to drop in a few cents?  Would I do it with shame and self-loathing?  Would I do it with an attempt at a quiet, resolute determination?  Would it get easier after a while?

Would it ever get to the point where it seemed like a better idea than getting a job?

------------------------------

There are two of them, a guy and a girl.  She’s sitting cross-legged on the corner, he’s standing behind her.  They appear to be younger than me.  They could be suburbanites hanging out in the city for a day except for one thing: the cardboard sign that says, “We’re homeless and hungry.  Please help.”

------------------------------

For a brief moment I wondered what angle the guy trying to sell me a 75 cent CTA card for 50 cents was working.

For a brief moment I wanted to believe that the guy really did get out of his wheelchair and walk away, chuckling at the suckers who gave him money thinking he really, actually needed it.

For a brief moment I wanted to ask how a guy could afford a cell phone when he couldn’t afford to feed his family.

For a brief moment I thought about following up to see if the $40 went down a little bit every day.

Then I realize I’m a terrible fucking human being.  I want that story to be true.  I want all these people to get in to their cars after a long, profitable day panhandling and go back to their big houses.  I want that because it justifies my own inaction.

I can’t fix any of this.    I don’t expect to and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

But I barely even try.  I mostly wish that the homeless really would be invisible, since they’re the only part of my return to Chicago that has been bringing me down.  Occasionally I catch myself resenting them for doing that.

You know, for existing.

------------------------------

The woman had the child half pulled out of a stroller in the middle of the Randolph Street Bridge.  The kid’s pants were partially down.  It seemed like a really weird place to be changing a kid. She really should have been doing it somewhere else, somewhere private.  Somewhere the world couldn’t see.

It took me a moment to realize she didn’t have a place like that.

------------------------------

I realize now that there’s only one thing I can do.  I have to force myself to see it.  Because only by forcing myself to see it can I force myself to figure out how to get others to see.

Because maybe, just maybe, if we try we can get Dick Durbin to open his eyes.

------------------------------

[1]Streetwise is one of those brilliantly fascinating ideas that springs from responding to a need.  It’s a weekly newspaper created to be sold by the homeless.  The organization then helps the vendors find housing and get their lives in order.

In 2009 the paper almost folded.  Over the course of a week nearly $200,000 in donations arrived to keep the publication going.  It’s one of those strange institutions, but it’s a Chicago thing.

[2]Kinda.  Consider this a paraphrase, as I was a little distracted by rage during the second half.

[3]Names hidden for two reasons: 1. I’d rather not use real names of real people in my life who wouldn’t be known by some other way, and 2. I don’t remember who [somebody] was, anyway.

[4]Not that it matters.  Considering the fact that the Founding Fathers have been turned in to evangelical Christians with an explicit desire to create a Christian nation and Jesus has been turned in to a small minded, judgmental capitalist, Reagan could have had the economic policies of V.I. Lenin and espoused social positions somewhere to the left of Oscar Wilde and he still would be lionized by the right if they decided to.  Such is the magic of historical revision and incuriousity.

------------------------------

Also, this:

 

You know you want in on This...

I'm heading back up to Chicago in July.  I've got a few things I plan to do while I'm up there.  There's a U2 concert.  There's a White Sox game.  There'll probably be some time hanging out with family and/or old friends and/or co-workers.  I'm going to be working at least one day in a vain attempt to pretend I'm on top of things.  Y'know, the usual.

But there is one super unusual thing I'm doing: Storytelling in the Snug.

That's right, kids.  I'm going back to the place where it all began, but this time I won't be in the audience, I'll be the teller.  I'm putting out a new collection of tales that I want to refer to as, "Never before heard outside of the state of Texas," but that seems like a bit of a lie, since for the first time ever I'm not working with my own original material.

It's a new set I like to call "Creation, Deception, and Death: Trickster and the Jealousy of the Gods."

So be there.  Assuming you're a reasonable distance from the lovely and picturesque Evanston, IL.

The Celtic Knot Public House
626 Church Street, Evanston
Sunday, July 10th at 8 PM

But get there early enough to get dinner.  It's delicious.  And there's a cupcake of the month.  What is it?  I don't know, since it's not yet July.

----------------

Also, Dallas people, fear not.  I'm hopefully going to have a big announcement for stuff going on down here by the beginning of July.

It's gonna be legen-wait for it-dary.

The Beast, Part 5

The Beast Audio Load File

No story is complete until it's told.  There is video, but I had to strip the audio out and punch up the volume.  I'm too lazy to reassemble the files at the moment, so this will have to do until I dig Ted out.  My laptop has Goldwave but no video editing software, whereas Ted does.  Ted, for the record, is my old desktop, which shall be retired soon.  The Mothership will be landing tomorrow...

The Beast, Part 4

The hardest thing when telling a story is to decide what story to tell.

It is one thing when the teller of the story is amongst friends.  One story leads to another.  One memory brings up another.  The story, then, is conversation, as natural as breathing.

But then, sometimes, the story is a performance.  Sometimes it comes with little advance warning and even less in the way of assistance.  “It’s in three weeks,” they tell you.  “You have ten minutes,” they say.  “There is no theme to work with.”

“Oh, and by the way, Texas will be watching.”

Sometimes it’s good to be busy.  Having too much to do means it’s really hard to think about things too much.  Having too much to do means it’s impossible to get nervous.

Having too much to do means you don’t have enough time to prepare.  It means you have to go back to the well, dust off a beloved old gem.  Of those, for me, there are four.  I thought I’d tell “Jimmy’s Journey,” as it’s an easy enough tale to tell.  I’ve even told it two or three times in the last year, so I actually remember it.

But then I decided that it was time to go back even farther.  Go back to the very beginning.

--------------

“I want you to read to me,” she said.  “It’s my favorite story from when I was a little girl.”

It was late summer.  I was about to go back for my last semester at WIU and still in the happy times with Her.  Leaving seemed unbearable, so sitting on that bench in front of my parents’ house and reading a story seemed like the best possible way to spend my time.

Thus was I introduced to the story of Dove Isabeau.  To the uninitiated, as I was that night, it is a children’s tale that hits all the standard fairy tale tropes of beautiful women and jealous stepmothers, but makes a single, key change.  Rather than render the maiden inert and force her to wait on rescue from the handsome, brave prince the story turns her in to the dragon those heroes then try to slay.

I stumbled through it, made a poor showing of pronouncing the francophone names.  It didn’t go the way she’d imagined, either, and she couldn’t hide her disappointment.  C’est la vie, I suppose.

--------------

The hardest thing when telling a story that’s been gathering dust is to remember.

The devil, as they say, is in the details.  The story, then, is the devil’s plaything.  It’s simple, trivial even, to remember the broad strokes of the story.  It’s all about archetype, progression, and event after all.  What makes the story matter, then, is how the storyteller interprets the tiny details that make a moment stick to the mind.  It’s all about cadence, turn of phrase, and those moments where the audience hangs on every word.

Telling a story for the first time since Labor Day weekend 2008, then, can be quite painful on the cusp of St Patrick’s Day 2011.  That’s why we have story circle.  The eyes of Texas were not upon me this evening.

It’s a problem, too, since I still remember the story.  But what I remember now is the story behind the story, the story about the story, and the story since the story.  Those have almost overwhelmed and choked out the story itself.

These things happen, I suppose.

--------------

She liked it when I told stories.  That’s why I’m a storyteller, really.  When all else failed, as it so often did, she loved hearing me tell stories.  I loved telling her stories.

The first couple I made up on the spot.  One was a bizarre little tale of talking animals invading Illinois I told her while we were killing time amid the Gothic arches and peaceful courtyards of the University of Chicago.  The other was of a princess who led an army to avenge her dead father I told while we sat on a rock at the edge of Lake Argyle when she visited me at WIU.

She liked that I was willing to make the princess the independent hero.  I liked pandering to my audience of one.  Even when I expanded my audience my initial story was intended primarily for her, though.

When I started to pull the story together it was a collection of fairy tale archetypes.  But I remembered that one, all-important twist from Dove Isabeau.  I let it guide the progression of my own story.

The audience who ever heard it was my audience of one.  She listened to me tell the story over the phone.  For twenty minutes I plodded along, obsessed with my belief that the best story is a long, epic story.

She told me I spoke too slowly, that I could stand to cut some of the fat out.

----------------

The hardest thing about telling a story is when it’s just not working and nothing seems to get it back on track.

I felt myself plodding through the story.  I repeated myself too many times, got caught up on describing and re-describing details that ultimately didn’t matter, and once totally forgot where I was going.

That’s the problem with storytelling.  A single mistake tends to cascade.  Forget a detail, put a name in the wrong place, or lose your cadence and everything falls apart from there.

That’s why we practice.

----------------

I told the story to an audience larger than one for the first time at a Fox Valley Storytelling Guild meeting.  It was the first or second meeting I’d attended.  On the way home I called her I was so excited.

Nearly a year later it became the first story I ever told at an actual concert at the Fox Valley Folk and Storytelling Festival.  By then I had cut the story down to about nine tight, well-considered minutes.

She didn’t see it.  We hadn’t spoken for nearly six months.

I put the story on the shelf after that.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  I experimented with different endings.  Eventually I turned it in to a series of blog posts.  That version was bitter, angry.  The endings were full of blood, death, regret, and despair.

-----------------

The hardest thing about telling the story is telling the story itself without telling all the other stories that feed in to and stretch out of that story.

I couldn’t tell the story in a vacuum.  Not tonight.  Not any night.  Afterwards I got feedback.

We were talking about the progression and I pointed out that the story is simply a collection of basic fairy tale archetypes.

One of the other stories said, “Yes.  It reminds me of [one story I didn’t recognize] and Dove Isabeau.”

All of the sudden I was back on that bench in front of my parents’ house.  I hadn’t thought of that moment in years.  The memory, surprisingly enough, was pleasant.

He suggested a modification to the ending.

“What if she doesn’t get rid of the bandits and the robbers?” he asked.  “She knows what it’s like to be an outcast, after all.”

-----------------

The best thing about stories is that they change.

It was my first real story.  It was the first I created from scratch.  It was the first I told at a guild meeting.  It was the first I told to an audience.

I can’t imagine telling a different one the first time I tell at the Texas Storytelling Festival.

This time, though, it will have a different ending.

Finally, a Reason for March to Exist...

I know there's one question that's on everyone's mind:

"What," you're asking yourself, "Is there to do in Denton, TX the second weekend in March?"

I'm glad you asked.  Because the second weekend in March just so happens to be the weekend of the Texas Storytelling Festival.

Should you, person who is asking yourself a ridiculously specific question, happen to be in Denton, TX on Friday, March 11th at approximately 5 PM you'll be able to go to the Rising Stars Concert.

"But Geds," you're saying to me, "I don't know any rising stars!  Why would that matter to me?"

First of all, damn, you're picky.  I mean, seriously.  First you're all, "I totally want to hang out in Denton."  Now you're all, "But only if there's some really good reason to."  Make up your mind.

And, if it helps, you actually do know a Rising Star: your friendly, neighborhood blogger.

That's right.  I'm gonna be on stage at the Texas Storytelling Festival for the first (and hopefully not last) time.

You can buy a ticket just for that or you can buy a ticket for the whole day.  Why not do the latter?  Hell, come back on Saturday.  And Sunday.  And hit up the ghost story sets on Thursday.

Um, in the interests of full disclosure, I will probably not be there on Thursday or Sunday.  My schedule does not look so good for those days...

The Maiden's Journey

I am a huge fan of Scalzi’s Big Picture pieces.  Even if it’s not something I’m particularly interested in (which, to be honest, is usually the case), the simple bit where he allows authors to say, “Hey, this is where my ideas came from,” can be amazing.  Talking about the root of an idea is always worthwhile, so the creation of a forum for exactly that discussion is to be applauded.

This particular Big Picture piece with Karen Mahoney introduced me to an essay on a style of story I had never in my life been even remotely aware of.  There is an archetypical story style known as the “Armless Maiden” story and, believe you me, I am fascinated by it in every way.  It informs me of something I’d always expected to be the case, but never actually looked for because I’d thought I had the answer to my question already.

I’ve started to move in to Phase 3 of my visualization of my “career” as a storyteller.  In Phase 1 I thought I’d tell Norse myth.  That phase lasted, roughly, from whenever I decided to try the storytelling thing (I’d say about April 2007) to whenever I first came up with the story I’ve referred to and written about a time or three as “The Beast.”

With “The Beast” I began to work with the idea of making my own stories out of the stories that have come before.  I wanted to explore the space of the story and expose the scaffolding of assumption on which most of our stories rest.  One of my big targets was the perception of women in the old archetypes.

See, I was well-versed in Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey.  It didn’t escape my attention, though, that basically every example of the hero is a male and the archetypical woman in the hero’s journey is only there to offer something to help the hero, to be rescued, or to play the role of the wife in the happily ever after ending.  Often, too, the roles are combined.

Women, then, only have a subsidiary role in the Hero’s Journey.  They function as supporting characters, with no will or dream of their own outside of those held by the male hero.  Confronting this idea head-on fascinates me.[1]

So when I was introduced to an essay called “The Armless Maiden and the Hero’s Journey” I was immediately hooked.  It should come as no surprise that I instantly grasped the implications of that particular word choice, too.  What took me by surprise, though, was that the term “armless maiden” wasn’t something the author had made up to describe the woman’s role in the Hero’s Journey, but a completely different cycle of stories.  As the very name of the style implies, these stories have a slightly different collection of difficulties for the protagonist than the male in the more common Hero’s Journey.

In the broadest possible strokes, Armless Maiden stories involve women who are not, for some reason, allowed to take their usual position in society.[2]  So they stay with a male family member.  From there something bad happens.  It seems that the usual[3] bad thing involves either a desired incestual sexual relationship from a male family member or a jealous wife of some sort moving to sabotage the maiden’s life.[4]  She is then taken out in to the woods and mutilated.  Either her hands are cut off, her arms are cut off at the elbows, or she’s reduced to a set of shoulders without any of those pesky upper limbs to distort their beauty.  Armless and mutilated, she is then left to die in the woods.

This, for the record, is an absolutely fascinating and deeply symbolic action, especially considering the general implications.  I can think of no similar version of the male Hero’s Journey.  The male will often lose something, but it’s an ennobling sort of loss.  He’ll lose his family, his position in society, his possessions, or occasionally his sight.  But whatever he loses he still has the power to manipulate the world around him.  The Armless Maiden, though, loses her ability to do much of anything without assistance.

That inability seems to be an important part of the plot.  Eventually the armless woman is discovered by a man who sees past her armlessness and falls in love with her.  Why?  Because she has a beautiful face.  Think about that one for a moment.  The message is, “Even if you can’t do anything, if you’re beautiful you will still have value.”

Of course the rest of the family doesn’t see it that way.  She can’t help out around the house with no arms, after all.  And when she gives birth to a baby…well what good is a mother who can’t hold her child?

Exacerbating the situation is that the husband who loves her has had to go away.  So now the new mother without arms is left with the in-laws who think she’s a waste of space.  A series of forged letters are then sent back and forth between the husband and the in-laws, after which the Armless Mother and her child are cast once again in to the wild to die.

At this point fate intervenes.  She encounters some sort of magical creature with purifying water who restores her arms.  At that point she returns to a place near her husband’s home and he eventually comes to fetch her after all the craziness with the letters and whatnot has been sorted out.  At this point the happily ever after happens.

As Midori Snyder points out, this is fundamentally opposite of the standard male Hero’s Journey.  The man chooses to heed the call, then goes out, does what he has to do, and returns to his home with the lessons (and, usually, the wife) he gained on his trip.  The woman is cast out, is then rescued on two separate occasions by powers outside of herself, and never returns to her original home.  I’ll let Ms. Snyder’s explanation of the conclusion of the arc speak for itself:

In the "Armless Maiden" narratives a girl is mutilated by a trusted family member and then thrust like a wounded animal into the forest. There can be no return to a childhood home corrupted by such cruel violence. The girl must move forward in her journey to a new destination where she will reconstruct not only her severed arms but her identity as an adult woman as well.

Note that the woman who goes on her journey does not, at any point, return home to bring what she learned (this, for the record, is the archetypal parallel to the bit where the male hero returns home from his journey with his new wife).  Also, note that when she loses her arms and goes through her struggles all she ends up doing is getting restored to the place she would have been in society, anyway.  She doesn’t become queen.  She isn’t famous the world over for her wit, wisdom, and insight.  She is simply a wife and mother.[6]

I now want to work an Armless Maiden story in to a concert.  On some level, I feel I need to.

See, as I said at the start, I’m transitioning in to Phase 3 of my conception of my storytelling…um, I’ll be generous to myself and call it a “career.”  I’ve decided to start putting together a collection of Trickster tales.  This, in turn, has freed me from the idea of always telling my own stories (and, since I like Loki, it allows me to tell a Norse tale or two).  My idea for the Trickster tales, though, wasn’t just to tell the stories, but to try to tell something about how the Trickster functions in the world.  It would be stories plus meta story, basically.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can tell some traditional tales interspersed with stories where I do mess with the archetypes to reveal the scaffolding would be a hell of a lot of fun, too.

But this leaves me with another question: do I, as a straight male with all of the privilege thereby implied, have the right to tell such stories?

Or does the fact that I, as a straight male of privilege, recognize the inherent inequality of the woman’s role v. the man’s role in the Hero’s Journey make that retelling all the more powerful?

--------------------------

[1]Although I do not self-identify as such, I am basically a feminist.  I also came to a realization of the concept of privilege, but not through having to be informed.  The fundamental absurdity and unfairness of the role of women in most of our stories and my awareness of it simply meant that when the idea of privilege was introduced to me I was able to say, “Ah, now I have a word for this thing.”

[2]“Usual position” meaning “married off to some random dude as soon as practical.”  If we’re going to get technical about it, at least…

[3]Read the essay in the afternoon, started researching the shit out of the concept in the evening so I could write intelligently about it.  Ah, Google, what would I do without you?

[4]Good, ol’ evil stepmother syndrome.  Remind me to have a talk about the wicked witch archetype one of these days.

[5]That reminds me of a tasteless old joke.  A guy was walking down a beach when he saw an armless and legless girl.  She called out to him and said, “Sir, I’ve never been kissed.  Could you please kiss me so I can know what it’s like?”  So he bent down and kissed her, then walked away.  A while later he walked past that same spot again and the girl was still there.  “Excuse me, sir,” she called out again, “I’ve never been fucked.  Can you please let me know what it’s like?”  So he picked her up, carried her out in to the water, and dropped her.

As he walked away he said, “Now you’re fucked.”

It’s too bad she wasn’t an armless, legless girl with a pretty face…

[6]Of course there’s nothing wrong with that if I make such a statement in a vacuum.  It’s just that this statement is not made in a vacuum.  It’s made within a system of archetypical characters where the lowly stable boy becomes king or the prince stripped of his birthright takes his vengeance and conquers the known world.  The male hero gets to overcome and transcend.  The female hero gets to overcome and…still be a supporting actor in a man’s world.

It’s unfair.  Unfair, I tells ya.

The Perfect Story

Do you mind if I tell you one of the best stories I’ve ever heard?  It won’t take long, I promise.  In fact, I’ll spend a lot more time talking about the story than telling it.  Just in case you don’t want to take the time to listen to me blather on about stories, I’ll even separate it out for you.  Read it.  It’s a good story.

The best I ever did with my life
Said just three honest words to you
Three droplets in a pail of lies
Three gems among the alibis

There some points in your life when all of the signs point to getting something done.  It’s an explicit thing in those cases.  Sometimes it goes beyond explicit to something along the lines of “head-boinkingly obvious.”

My first real triumph as a storyteller came in the middle of September, 2009.  It was the night I told “Skinwalkers” at Spoken Word Cafe and stepped off stage knowing, for the first time, that I had absolutely nailed a story and, holy shit, maybe I could actually do this storytelling thing.  It was the night that Jim May suggested that maybe in the future I could come back and tell another story if the opportunity arose.

I could imagine nothing that could possibly get in the way of me going back and telling another story as soon as humanly possible.

As Mike Scott once said, though, if you want to give god a laugh, just tell her your plans.  A month later I found out my job was being sent down to Dallas and within a few weeks of that I reached the conclusion that I was going to be going with it.  I was soon informing people of my imminent move.  The near-universal message I got from my storyteller friends was simple and direct:

Find Elizabeth Ellis.

The best I ever did with my love
Said your name on the microphone
You heard it in the restaurant
Cashed out and brought your tips back home

When I first decided to become a storyteller I did what seemed to me to be an eminently sensible thing.  I started listening to more music.  Specifically, I spent more time than I had in the past specifically listening to specific kinds of music.  The shorthand is for such things would generally be considered “singer/songwriter” music.  But, in general, what I tried to do is find songwriters who used music to spin a tale and I listened to how they did it and how they put their words together.

My initial goal was simply to see if I could, by some sort of osmosis, become a more lyrical and polished storyteller.  I think I must have had some sort of pretension of becoming a black preacher or something.  I don’t know.  I think I did imagine myself dropping in to a sort of measure, rhythmic sing-song style of storytelling.

That didn’t happen.  Sometimes the small gifts are the best ones.

What happened, instead, was that my stories started to get shorter.  It wasn’t really an intentional thing on my part.  I think it happened quite accidentally, really.

The first couple stories I told were something in the neighborhood of 20 minutes.  They were intricate, epic, and, I imagine, pretty dull.  I ended up basically dropping one, as it was a long Norse myth and I didn’t feel like telling it anymore.  I edited “The Beast” down quite a bit and it ended up being about nine minutes long and much, much better.  Like, seriously.  Better.

After that my stories tended to be in the eight minute range.  At first this actually worried me.  I’d seen myself as this storyteller who did big, epic things and here I was coming up with short and small.  Eventually, though, I realized that was okay.  I'd begun to learn the fine art of paring my stories down to just what needed to be told.  I’d focused on the essence.

Eventually, too, that sense of the essence of a thing made its way in to my writing.  The places I found I had to write the least were in places where I put music in between.  Once I realized I could say so much with so few words everything else started to fall in to place.

The last story I put together takes about five minutes to tell and is not epic in the least bit.

It’s also, hands down, my favorite story so far.

The best I ever did with my bucks
Put two down on your horse to show
She lost but just kept racing ‘round
Kept running ‘til the sun went down

I saw Jim May this past October at the Illinois Storytelling Festival.  He asked if I’d met Elizabeth Ellis yet and I had to say that, no, no I hadn’t.  I hadn’t even tried particularly hard to find her.  I was apparently quite apologetic or defensive when I said this, as he said, “Hey, I’m not telling you that you have to.  I’m just saying that I think it would be a good idea.”

A year to the day after I moved to Dallas I finally met Elizabeth Ellis.

Sometimes when you meet someone you’ve only heard about through others that Dr. Livingston moment is disappointing.  The person turns out to be just kind of, well, meh.  Or, worse, that person just possesses a personality that doesn’t work with yours and you end up just not getting along.  Although I doubted it would happen, I dreaded the possibility of just that eventuality.

As it turns out, I already love Elizabeth Ellis.

A bunch of us were having dinner and she mentioned a musician that was going to be in town.  She said that every semester she gives her students (she teaches a graduate level class on storytelling.  I know!) a CD with five perfect stories on it.

They’re all songs.

One of the other storytellers didn’t quite understand why she does that.  Elizabeth said, “Storytellers tend to come up with these really long stories.  But a good song writer can tell and entire story in four minutes with a chorus.”

I’m currently compiling a list.  Next time I see Elizabeth Ellis I’m going to give her a CD with some stories on it.

These are the songs I’ve put on the list I’ll choose from so far:

Lost Immigrants, “Memories & Rust” (almost definitely)
Lost Immigrants, “Below” (one of the best fit songs on the list to the original idea)
Refreshments, “Nada” (almost definitely)
Paul Simon, “Under African Skies”
The Waterboys, “Long Way to the Light”
Over the Rhine, “Last Night on Earth Again”
Over the Rhine, “Jesus in New Orleans”
Jessi Lynn, “Someday Soon”
Saw Doctors, “Red Cortina” (almost definitely)
RCPM, “Green & Dumb”
RCPM, “Jack v. Jose”
The Railbenders, “Driving Back to Denver”
Drew Kennedy, “Goodbye” (one of the best fit songs on this list)
Mike Doughty, “No Peace, Los Angeles”

And, of course,

Mike Doughty, “Ways + Means”

It’s the story I told earlier in this post.  Honestly, I think both Mike Doughty songs have to make it.  I’ve never heard anyone tell a more complete story using fewer words.