Last night I dreamed that M and I were in a band, and our gig was in Gainesville, although it had the New York subway system. I always dream about the subway to some extent. Also, there were several people there I went to high school with in Alabama, and it appeared, from the way they were dressed to still be the 80s. One guy had a clip-on tie, but he wasn’t wearing a collar, so he had it taped to his neck.
Blog
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Notes
A story about life passing before one’s eyes when they are drowning. The drowning part isn’t given away until the end.
A story about a couple that tries all kinds of sexual experimentation and always end up either disgusted with themselves or injured.
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Conversationalism
I had a dream recently that involved a character that engages people in deep conversations then surreptitiously turns the conversation to his obsession with pornography. I thought I should make a note of it for future reference.
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Popcanon Story for YM Market?
Another story idea. I think I am working on too many right now to focus on another one, so I’ll just make a note of it here. A story about PopCanon on tour – from Alyson’s point of view. Try and get it published in YM. It’s M’s idea, and I’m intrigued enough to give it a shot, but not this week.
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The Obituary
About three years ago, I happened across an obituary article in the Gainesville Sun. The girl who died was in her early 20s, a music student. She lived in a neighborhood close to where I lived and within a block of where my aunt Melissa lives. Her only surviving family members were three brothers and a mother who all lived in Italy. There was no indication of how she died, and so I thought it was fairly likely that it was a suicide.
The article included a picture, which showed her as a very pretty young lady with dark cropped hair. She had the cow-eyed tragedy of an Isabella Rosellini about her. I recall that I showed the article to E, with whom I was living at the time. E reached out and touched the picture as if to stroke the girl’s cheek and said, “Life is such a mystery.”
I was struck by the fact that this tragedy, whatever its details, struck someone I didn’t know, but that I could have easily met her at some point either through some musical event, or just walking down the street. Furthermore, I felt as if I wished I’d known her, and the fact that I hadn’t known her added to the tragic sense.
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Theory
Theory: Religious beliefs are rationalizations designed to reconcile our concrete observations with concepts or beliefs instilled in us by social conditioning. As more people have an increased awareness of the physicality of the universe, doubts are cast on old belief systems and these rationalizations become more elaborate and abstract.
I think the desire to form these rationalizations is so strong because these various concepts and beliefs have ramifications beyond the physicality of science. They play a large role in how our culture has evolved, how things like entertainment media, economics and legal systems are structured. This is probably too far-reaching of a theory to be easily proven or disproven, but to me it answers some questions, perhaps.
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I’m from Birmingham
Sometimes I think that I should just write, and if I can’t think of how the current story should end, I should just start writing the story of my life, not for anyone to read, but just to stay in the practice of writing.
I always say I’m from Birmingham, Alabama. That’s only partially true. I lived there until I was ten, and I went to college there for two years. Conveniently, my parents live there now, but they didn’t live there at the time when I was last living there. Going home, for me, is not really going home. My parents live in a house where I never lived. When I go see them, it’s kind of like staying in a hotel.
Sometimes when I visit Birmingham, I go back to the old neighborhood where we lived when I was really young — the place with which I associate most of my childhood memories. I drive around. Once I stopped in an antique shop there, and I told the woman working there that I had lived in the neighborhood twenty years before. She asked who I was, and when I told her, she recognized my name. She was the mother of one of my classmates in elementary school – a lanky, soft-spoken kid named Jaime. I didn’t know him well, but he had been on the basketball team with me.
I told Jaime’s mother that I was writing a book. I asked her what happened to the woods. I had discovered earlier that afternoon that the woods I used to play in had all been torn down and replaced by really ugly, generic houses. Jaime’s mother said that developers did all that so quickly that nobody even had time to protest it. She was as disappointed as I was. Those woods were sacred to me.
I wasn’t allowed to play in the woods, but I did anyway, almost every day. I think my mother was afraid that vagrant child molesters hung out in the woods. I never saw any. However, when I was ten and we moved to Dothan, there were also woods nearby, and I saw a lot of creepy old men in those woods. They creepy old men never bothered me. Sometimes I would talk to them, but they never tried to touch me. I never felt in danger.
In the woods in the Birmingham neighborhood, there was a trail that you could take that would take you directly to the little strip mall where there was a video arcade and a drug store, the two important areas of commerce for a fourth grader. The appeal of the arcade was obvious. The drug store was mainly for buying candy. It was a Big B, a chain that has since been bought out by a larger chain of drug stores. I got an allowance of five dollars a week, and candy and video games were the only things I spent money on. I hadn’t yet started buying records.
I recall buying Willy Wonka Bottle Caps and separating them out by color, storing them in a drawer in my room. I would eat them slowly over the course of many days, consuming my favorite flavors first: root beer then cola, then grape and so on. It was an odd ritual I had surrounding this candy. Looking back, I don’t quite understand it.
I remember that I liked to look at a map of the city, which seemed so enormous then. Our suburb of Bluff Park hadn’t yet been annexed into the city of Hoover, a suburb itself. Hoover alone seemed enormous to me then. There were two other suburbs between Hoover and Birmingham proper – Vestavia and Homewood. We went to church in Vestavia, but we rarely went further into town than that.
Earlier in my childhood, too early for me to remember with any clarity, we had lived in Homewood. Later, as an adult, I explored all these neighborhoods where I had lived as a kid, trying, without much luck, to invoke formative memories, something that would be novel-worthy.
I was mostly clueless, at this point, about the dark history of civil rights conflicts in Birmingham, which came to a head less than a decade before I was born. I knew only the long and hilly streets of my own neighborhood. Birmingham is full of hills, winding roads, expansive suburban enclaves that careen up the sides of mountains and then suddenly drop off again.
It is a very conservative town, but because of that, there is a guilty pleasure in anything wild, smoking pot, or staying out all night drinking at some dive that only the most hardcore all-nighters know. Regular bars close at two, but there are a couple of “private clubs” that stay open all night and have live jazz until four or five in the morning. It always feels like playing in the woods. There’s a sense of playing part in an obscure Grimm fairy tale.
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Bed-Stuy Reflections
It is interesting to me how much New York is segregated by race. Having grown up in Alabama, I saw a lot of this, but I want to think New York is so much more civilized. Of course, I know it isn’t. I saw “Do the Right Thing,” which takes place in the neighborhood where I live and paints a fairly accurate picture of what the neighborhood is like.
I live in a neighborhood of Brooklyn called Bedford-Stuyvessant, or Bed-Stuy. It is a very large, mostly black, mostly lower class neighborhood. One of the main drags, which runs about four blocks south of my block, is Fulton Street, which was apparently one of the main thoroughfares of the Underground Railroad. In fact, there is a movement afoot (getting resistance from some of the other neighborhood) to rename the street Harriet Tubman Boulevard or something of that nature.
Friends of mine tell me that lots of people, by which they mean white people, are moving to Bed-Stuy these days, but still I rarely see another white face. When I do, they seem to disappear into their apartment buildings quickly and silently as ghosts. Sometimes, I do get strange looks when I walk down the street, probably due more to the way I dress than the color of my skin. But I can’t help wondering if it’s just because I’m white, and I’m walking around as if I live here. And I do live here, at least for the time being.
Once, walking down Fulton Street, I passed three white cops. I saw one of them point at me, and I’m sure I heard him say, “There’s a pioneer.” I understand that this is the local vernacular for white people, especially young people and artists, moving into questionable neighborhoods, typically neighborhoods that are mostly poor and black or Hispanic. But the term caused me to reflect on its several meanings. I like thinking of myself as a pioneer. It suits me.
The pattern of gentrification appears to begin with artist types looking for cheap quarters. The next step is that since a neighborhood has started to fill up with artists, art events start happening, followed by bars, restaurants and nightclubs. People start buying up and renovating property. The hipsteratti (I just made that up – cute, right? I think it’s clear whom I mean) move in. Before you know it rent is as high as in the Village, the artists start looking for another ghetto, and the pattern begins again. This is something that everyone in New York knows and accepts as part of life.
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Form and Function
I have found myself lately fascinated with the epistolary form. As a form of narrative it has few pretenses, being a natural evolution of the use of language to relay information from one person to another when oral language is not an option or isn’t as convenient. Subconsciously, I think my approach to keeping this journal is informed by that form as well. It could well be interpreted as a letter to a person I know well but seldom see, a way of communicating and preserving my daily mundane thoughts.
I also like the dialogue format for similar reasons – a simple transcription of oral transaction. Again, it’s a very natural way to use language as a method of preserving a moment. I wonder then, why I don’t incorporate these forms more into my own fiction. Instead, I tend more toward methods that attempt to contrive narrative without much structure, like trying to make buildings out of wind.
This question has been a tension for as long as I have had any ambition to be a serious writer and one of the reasons that I virtually stopped writing for a few years. There is a sense of alchemy about making a story come to life from the void of an empty page, which I think adds to the desire to remove any semblance of “form” from the story. Break it down to the essential symbols that create the characters, the setting and the action. But when you do that, you have before you the virtually impossible task of making something recognizable from things that are unfamiliar.
There is an aspect of this same attempted alchemy in some of the music I was composing a few years ago, things I was recording at home with primitive instruments and substandard recording equipment. I was trying to create soundscapes using only what I happened to have lying around the house. I had ambient microphones placed around a room, plugged into various effects – delay loops, pitch shifters, distortion pedals. I now have the means to make this experiment a lot more interesting.
M. David Hornbuckle 