Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

OMG DAD

PavowskiLeave a comment

The ambush predator lies in wait.

It disguises itself, or hides itself, under bushes or in crevices in rocks, blending in with its surroundings. It lurks.

The ambush predator is not built to take its quarry head-on; it’s not built for that. The ambush predator is not a creature of great strength. If it sees that you see it coming, you are as safe as can be.

But when it can take you unawares …

You will be dead before you even realize you’ve been attacked.

This is how my son tells me stories.

If you haven’t been told a story by somebody younger than 10 lately, let me enlighten you. They know what punctuation is, but they’re not much impressed. It’s like having one of those walls-of-text you see on the internet read to you by an AI voice that doesn’t need to breathe or pause or think. Pure aural overload.

HEY dad i was playing this game and i found this guy and he was a bad guy but you know what i was STRONGER than him so i used my guy’s laser power but it didn’t work so THEN do you know what i did I went and got my sister oh but she as mad at me and she hit me in the leg and I think she should be in trouble for that don’t you because she hits me all the time and it’s not fair but she came with me and we went after the guy and now he’s dead wanna see?

And all I wanted was to make it to the kitchen and back for a glass of water to head back to bed for another thirty minutes.

I mean, the sun’s not even up yet, and I’m being brutalized by this affront to grammar, by this run-on sentence from the sixth circle of hell.

And the thing is, like an ambush predator, he has to spring it on me. He has to wait around the side of a door and pounce on me as I walk through, or sit on the couch in the living room in the dark and wait for me to walk past, or even creep up at the side of the bed while I’m *still sleeping* to launch into one of these impromptu sermons.

He barely stops to breathe.

And it’s sort of cute — sort of — that he’s so enthusiastic about everything. That there’s wonder and amazement in almost everything that happens to him, that a little thing like seeing a bug on a windowsill can get him so worked up that he almost goes red in the face just trying to get it all out and tell me every emotion he had about it.

I wish I had that energy.

Breaks

PavowskiLeave a comment

I usually have some big-time hangups about taking breaks; especially breaks from workouts and runs. But I allowed myself some days off this week for some aches and pains and not only does it feel, a few days on, that it was the right thing to do (I’m 40 now, after all), but I’m surprisingly not beating myself up about it.

Perhaps I feel less bad about taking a break from the physical because I’ve been making good progress with the novel lately. Particularly, it feels like I’m reaching the end of the editing phase where I might actually let some poor souls read it and tell me how bad it is for somebody outside my own head. Usually those two tides rise and fall together — the body feeds the mind after all — but now and then an ebb in one means a flow in the other.

Anyway, we’ve got a week off from this “school” thing we’re attempting to do, and that break feels well-earned, too.

Do I deserve it? Probably not.

Am I going to enjoy every minute of it? You bet.

Will I still have quickies posted? Your guess is as good as mine.

Job Security

PavowskiLeave a comment

The roof in my building leaks.

There are a couple spots — I’m in a biggish building — but the regular offender is our prop room. Water comes in right in the corner by the door and about ten feet further on, where it pools in the light fixture. This freaked me out at first, but the guy told me it was nothing to worry about.

It has leaked for years, and every year, they fix it. (“Fix” it.) It gets good and dry back there, and when it rains a bit, sure enough, it stays dry. For just long enough for us to begin taking it for granted. Then months later, heavy rains come (and, uh, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s currently raining heavily in the South), and that familiar pat-pat-pat starts up.

And the guy comes back around to fix it (“fix” it). We see each other and shake our heads, as if to say, “here we are again, huh?” And he’ll say something like “thought we had it licked last time” and I’ll say “yep, man, it’s been bone dry for the longest time, but all of a sudden…” and off he goes to fix it (“fix” it) again. There’s a kind of resignation about the guy every time I see him, yet he’s always smiling. Like he’s been beat down by the job or by life or whatever, but he’s happy to go a few more rounds.

Of course, the pat-pat-pat that means I have to clean out the prop room again is just the sound of job security to him. Size of our campus, there are always leaky roofs.

Popcorn

PavowskiLeave a comment

Picture a popcorn maker.

A big one, like at the movies.

You feed in kernels, salt, and oil, and in a few minutes it begins overflowing with savory buttery goodness. Golden fluffs of transcendent flavor.

Popcorn, Snack, Food, Buttered, Pop, Corn, Salty

When I worked at the movie theater, we’d make bonus batches — a batch with double the salt and oil. Absolute heaven. Probably shaved a few weeks off our lives with every bucket, but we were seventeen, what did we care?

Anyway, I figure a writer’s brain is like that. The hopper spins round and round churning out the ideas at a ridiculous rate, the fluffy poofed tidbits spilling out in a cascade. Except instead of the lovely glass enclosure, the writer’s brain is a popcorn popper spinning over a great black void that swallows up all the sun-kissed salty bits. (1. I’m really hungry and would eat a whole bucket of popcorn with great vengeance right now. 2. Sun-kissed salty bits sounds dirty, upon further review.)

Most of those ideas go right down the memory hole.

Doing a little bit of daily writing, I figure, is a way to put the hopper in its glass case, at least for a few minutes; this is the benefit, I think, to doing a bit of unscripted, unpurposed writing every day. You get a time capsule, almost, of whatever you were thinking on a given day. More than once I’ve had the thought that “oh yeah, I wrote something about that in my Drivel this morning, let me go back and read it.”

My problem is, my handwriting is atrocious, so my lovely glass case is smeared and scratched and probably not worth looking into.

I dunno, I thought there was a metaphor in there somewhere, but all this post did was make me even hungrier.

I Dream of Hair

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’ve been bald by choice for 10 (help!) years now.

I buzzed it for the first time when I was 30, went briefly back to keeping it short for maaaybe a year, and have been shaving it ever since. (Every Sunday — except sometimes on Mondays — I shave my face and just keep on going right over the top.)

This is a development that would dishearten some men, apparently, but for me, it’s just one less thing to worry about. Plus, I don’t have to worry about messing up my hair when I wear a hat, so even though I don’t wear a lot of hats (my white-guy-in-a-fedora phase was short-lived, you’re welcome), that’s always on the table.

Anyway, baldness is easy, fun, and easy, and, dare I say, stylish? It’s also easy; not sure if I mentioned that.

But apparently some part of my subconscious wants my hair back, because recently I dreamed that I had hair again. And not just hair, but the full-on, down-to-my-shoulders, shampoo-commercial hair I had in high school.

What does this say about me? When I take such smug pride in my baldness, only to have my subconscious serve up an image of myself with Fabio-esque locks? That I’m living a lie? That I only tell myself I love being bald so I’m not crushed by the cosmic unfairness of it?

Well, no, I don’t think so, because in the same dream I hated having hair again and immediately made to shave it off.

Dreams are stupid.