Life After G.L.O.W.

When I was twelve years old, my father, in one of his more subtle attempts to force me into "boyhood," convinced me to play baseball. “Lump, you’re trying out for little league,” his hands firm at ten and two. Saturday mornings were usually spent in the company of my sister Jes and the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling. Jes and I would turn our usual sibling rivalries into extraordinary death matches pitting the Farmer’s Daughter against Debbie Debutante—yes, I actually hit my sister. Hard sometimes. Instead my father and I spent the next few weekends practicing, playing catch and shopping for a left-handed glove and a bat. I believe these items still remain in perfect condition in a box in his attic--I couldn’t wait to get back in front of the television.

At tryouts my father watched me as if he were watching an amputee trying to tie his shoe. A spark of hope soon dissolved into pity and mild disgust. I didn’t hit or catch a ball that day but, as one parent put it so justly, “At least he can run.” Yes, I was grateful for that. The next weekend my father told me an informer had written to the Aston-Middletown Athletics Association heralding our bureaucratic indiscretion: My legal residence was with my mother in another township so I couldn’t play. In other words, Son, you were horrible and I’m going to spare you the embarrassment of telling you with this well-constructed and, if I do say so myself, believable lie. I decided the only way to process these kinds of failures was to write about them.

Writing has since remained a process of survival. I cannot imagine coping via any other medium. Beyond the therapeutic aspects of word-purging, I have come to define and value myself in the construction of fictional worlds and characters, building meaning within vacuums and, essentially, living my common fantasies, idiosynchratic notions and subliminal insecurities. Perhaps I’m finally seeking my father’s approval: Hey, dad, I might suck at baseball, but at least I can write about it!

Some fears...

Losing friends and family to death, to time, to circumstance, to pride
Losing love
Abandonment
"Forever"
The Ordinary
Falling
Murder with the lights on
Parasites
Cars
Loss of control (See "Falling" and "Cars")
Judgment

What are you afraid of?

Today, My Dog Ate My Vampire Spec

Christ, I really wish he would just eat the damn thing! But there it is. Stacked. Half-finished. Derivative. Five years too late. Why is the vampire story a rite of passage for writers? What is it about this metaphor that forces so many to write themselves into shallow graves? What is it about this vampire story that is literally sucking the life out of me?

In a genre that’s a minefield of clichés and worn-out “rules,” what story is left to tell? How do I bring fresh blood to the old heme-bag? (Originally I wanted to title this blog entry “The Top Ten Reasons I Shouldn’t Write A Story About Vampires” or "How Twilight Ruined Vampire Movies Forever.") What’s my motivation? What’s my Monster’s motivation? More importantly, why do I even like vampires in the first place?! I feel absolutely drained and at the same time I’m possessed. I need to tell a story about vampires. I’ve tried to place it gently aside, shut it in a drawer somewhere, ignore the countless files and drafts and scribbled notes.

But just when I’ve managed to distract myself, to start work on another more promising—and original—story, I’m gripped. The premise seems so perfect: A Coming-of-Age, Fish Out-of-Water, Rags to Riches story about a character who must Overcome a Monster, a Vampire. It’s fresh! It’s alive! It’s…been Done to Death. And this is always the nail in the coffin. The Monster. What does the Monster want? Blood? Body count? These days, it’s not as easy as, say, What would happen if a vampire moved next door to you? (Thanks, Tom Holland.) Like us, monsters, especially vampires, have desires. They want families and companionship (Lost Boys, Let Me In). They want to be loved, to be left alone or both (Twilight). They want to enact complicated plots for world domination (Blade, Buffy).

Are vampires actually the victims here? Aren't they as bored and tired of all the rules, the Dos and Don’ts of being undead? I think ultimately vampires just want to get along, to be understood for the over-exposed, demystified creatures they really are. We know them a little too well and they are, perhaps, the worse for wear. Maybe we are the real monsters.

Like So Many Houseplants

I’ve been thinking and feeling my way through so much inherited emotional bullshit lately. How finding pornography at such a young age has completely warped my notion of sex. How adolescent retreats to clandestine fist-humping helped me to escape intimacy and deal with the isolation I felt. Why playing catch with my father as a six year-old boy always ended with him telling me I throw like a girl. (He now coaches my thirteen year-old sister’s softball team. He also fully embraces me as a gay man.) How the only thing I wanted, ever, through all of this, was pure and unconditional love. Thankfully I’ve managed to survive my thirtysomething resentment with only a few scrapes and bruises.

But back to the actual act of contemplation: Why do we buy so easily into the grand myth of “true love”? Why is it the fabric for almost every story, the hope of every human being on the planet? True love is a mountain. It’s an ocean—of water, of time. It’s an abyss. Why the drama, people?! Is this message irresponsible? I believe everybody is entitled to true, unconditional love- I buy this part. I’m all-in. But my experiences have taught me that love does not come like the intense rush of a flood but, rather, like a (re)gifted houseplant, one that’s sort of wilting and yellow around the edges. It takes a certain giftee to look closer, to recognize the plant’s strong roots; to decipher its pleas for a larger container and a little more exposure; to fully recognize its willingness to thrive despite its environmental limitations and its dependence on another to give it more tenderness, more attention, more light, than its previous owner. It is a decision to accept and to care for something that possesses an extraordinary potential for beauty. It’s an opportunity to restore life. This is not unlike the unfurling of true love. And all in its presence feel immediately at home.