The Bag Man

PavowskiLeave a comment

Chuck’s challenge for the week: The car chase.

The fact is, I am not that thrilled with car chases. All they ever seem like is another tool to demonstrate how clever the chasee is and how inept the chasers are, and usually that’s just a big game of cops and robbers but with explosions and smashed fruit stands and millions of dollars in collateral damage. So I tried something a little different, a sort of Walter Mitty glimpse inside a familiar scenario.

The Bag Man

Wednesday mornings are the best. I get left alone most of the time, only occasionally getting called upon to fetch this or that. Mostly I hang around trying to dig up dirt on the neighborhood offenders, a couple of crazy cats that like to loiter around and cause trouble for the locals. Makes me sick, really. Dunno why they can’t keep that stuff in their own neighborhood. It’s sort of a little game we have: one of them will set up shop in a shady spot until they see me coming, and then they just bolt. Truth be told, I don’t know what I’d do if I caught one of ’em, but I chase ’em to send the message: this is my turf, not yours. But before too long they hop a fence or scramble up a fire escape or something, and well, I’m not in the shape I once was, so that’s usually the end of that. I can’t help but get the sense that they’re laughing at me, but this is my turf — it’s not like I’m going to STOP chasing down the no-goodniks.

But there are none of them hanging around this morning, which is good. Leaves me undistracted so I can focus on the big kahuna.

I’ve been chasing this guy for years, but I’ve never truly had a good chance at catching him. He always catches me unawares, showing up and dropping off packages for his associates, and clearing out before I can question him. He doesn’t wait around for payment, so I’m guessing he’s just some sort of bag man for some even bigger, more sinister syndicate operating right under my nose. I’ll hear the roar of his engine as I’m sitting down for a nice bowl of chow, or while I’m hunkering down for a midday nap, and by the time I can get on the road to look for him, all I can see are his taillights going around the bend. He’s been dodging me for years, and all I’ve got is his vehicle; a flat white truck with blue stripes. Inconspicuous. Blends right in. Vanishes quick.

But not today. Today my superiors have been a little lax with the call-ins, and as a result I’ve been ensconced in this sweet little spot all morning. I’ve got the whole road staked out, from the Johnsons’ place with the absurd little Cupid fountain out front, to the Smiths’ down at the end of the block with that gorgeous picket fence. The kind the neighborhood toughs want to pee all over. Sleepy little town. My town. When this guy rolls through today, he’s gonna feel the heavy weight of justice as I clamp down with my —

Son of a bitch. There he is.

I hear him before I see him, the peppy little coffee-grinder sound of his engine betraying him from around the corner of the Johnsons’ yard with that low-hanging Magnolia tree. He’ll lurch into view, turn this way up the street, and then I’ll have him. And, sure as sunshine, there he is, the boxy front end of his little white truck poking into view, before he makes his move…

Bingo.

He turns down my street and I turn from my post, hopping down from my window seat — its comfortable shape, molded perfectly to my butt, forgotten as I fly into action — and down the stairs. I skid out of control when I hit the linoleum in the diner — they must’ve just waxed — and crash into the kitchen wall with a decidedly unheroic yelp. Not my proudest moment. I spin around in a jiffy, though, and dart for the back door, which crashes open as I barrel through it and bangs shut the moment I am clear. Its clatter sets my teeth on edge as it does every time I give chase, priming me for the hunt.

The truck is almost at the Smiths’ by the time I careen onto the road behind him, my tail end swinging wildly out into the far lane as I fight for traction on the rain-slick asphalt. Then everything catches and I am flying, hurtling through space toward him, his white-paneled exterior growing large in my vision, the absurd red-and-blue eagle taunting me from the back hatch. I see his arm withdraw, empty of packages, and I know it’s him. Another successful drop. The wind of my pursuit flows like fingers through my hair, whistles in my teeth, tastes of paper and diesel and lunch meat on my tongue.

His engine growls and he lurches away from the curb, that tinny grinding sound like a nest of angry bees infuriating me. He’s not getting away, I silently vow, not today. And I am certain that he can hear my growl from behind, because he’s picking up speed, scattering tiny pebbles like living, malevolent marbles and causing me to slip and fall further behind.

He can’t get away. But he’s going to. If he makes the turn onto Oak, he gets away every time. I can’t keep up with him in the open.

I call out for backup, barking out in short, clipped phrases to my colleagues, trying to get them to join the chase — The bag man! He’s on Studebaker Street! I’m in pursuit! — but I know, in my heart of hearts, that nobody will help me this time. I’ve roused them too many times, I’ve made this my own personal crusade, I’ve exhausted them with my tales of my great chases after this guy. I can see them now, elbow-deep in piles of trash looking for leads, asleep at the desks catching a nap before their shifts, lazily munching a snack of congealed bacon and beef from last night’s leftover burgers (probably going bad, but some guys will eat anything). They’ll hear my call, think to themselves, Rufus is at it again, and start laughing, already anticipating my tale of another failed pursuit.

Not this time, boys. I dart forward and just miss his bumper, go sailing into the road as he clips the turn short. An oncoming wood-paneled wagon slams its brakes and skids, its occupant just visible above the wheel, squinting through glasses that make her eyes look somehow twice as big as her head. She stares at me and I shout at her, “Get outta the way!” but she’s frozen behind the dash like a deer that’s just scented a predator, and I have to take to the sidewalk to get around her.

She’s helped this monster get away without even knowing it — Oak Street is a long stretch of straight road, and the white truck has opened up a tremendous gap on me. I slide back onto the asphalt, ignoring the honks of the angry motorists I cut off, and continue halfheartedly down the street. His taillights are tiny in the distance. He’s going to get away, I think, but then his taillights light up like great red eyes, and they stay lit. He’s stopping.

I’m renewed. Adrenaline surges into every inch of me as I open all the way up, cannonballing down the street, shocked motorists swerving aside and shouting out at my passage. He’s only a hundred yards away now. Fifty. I’m actually going to catch him. It’s happening. I can taste my victory. My tongue slides out across my teeth and hangs there.

I close the last twenty yards in a frenzy, sliding in sideways on the glossy black street to block his escape. I stare at him through the windshield, my weapons out, howling at him. Out of the car! He looks out the window, sees me, and jumps in surprise back against the door. Never expected I’d catch you, did you, you lowlife? He looks panicked. His eyes dart from me to his steering wheel, to the traffic stopped all around, onlookers gaping in dumbfounded wonder. I hear the chatter of my colleagues echoing in the background. They can’t believe I’ve done it, and they’re rushing to the scene to get a firsthand look. This is how it’s done, boys.

With a sudden movement, he slips the vehicle into low gear and tries to dart past me into the oncoming lane, but I lurch sideways and head him off. He backs off and tries to take the sidewalk, but I’m there in a flash, shouting at him now louder than ever. His eyes are wide, terrified. I can smell the fear washing off him in waves. He eases his hands off the wheel and holds them up, in the universal “nothing to fear here” gesture.

Horns are sounding all around, people are shouting. This has gone on long enough; they want to get on with their business. I realize, suddenly, that I have never actually thought of what I would do if I caught this man. I can’t kill him. He won’t talk to me — probably doesn’t even speak my language. We stare at each other in silence for a few moments as I decide, as slowly as the leaves turning, that there’s nothing for it. I have to let him go.

It’s enough, I think, that he knows I caught him. That I could catch him again, any time I wanted to. It’s enough that he knows this street belongs to me. It’s enough to let him go, terrified of what might happen next time. I pull my lips back in a snarl and move out of the road to let him pass.

He slides by with terror in his eyes, but he can’t resist having the last word. Through his rolled-down window, he shouts in a tremulous voice full of defeat: “Nice doggy.”

Then his wheels spin and in a spray of mist from the road, he’s driving off into the distance.

I lick my paws, as if this was my plan all along: to catch and dismiss this man. I move to make an explanation, but nobody’s even looking at me now; the cars are just sliding past, moving on with their own respective Wednesdays. I see my colleagues, gathered at the edges of fences, tugging at the ends of their leashes, trying to get a better look. Their faces are a mix of amazement and wonder. I know what they’re thinking. He caught the bag man. It’s enough. I pad back to the house, my head and my tail held high. Smells like lunchtime.

The Long Con

Pavowski5 Comments

I’ll be honest, as I’ve been in the past: I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m making this all up as I go along. All of it. Life. Fathering, writing, teaching, running, husbanding… you will find no stores of expertise here, and precious few pearls of wisdom in a heap of dusty crumbs of idiocy. But you’ll also see that that doesn’t stop me from pretending.

I use this blarg all the time to talk about things I pretend to know a lot about. I dispense all sorts of marginally intelligible writing advice, I wax eloquent about the virtues of distance running, I tell funny stories about baby poop that hint at, but never actually deliver, profound lessons about life. Why bother doing all this, when I’m not actually a writing guru, not actually a running yogi, not actually a SuperDad?

Because I want to be those things.

But here’s the trick: you don’t get to flick a switch and start being those things. The road from where you are to where you want to be is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the weak and the tyranny of evil men. (Or maybe that’s only if you’re Samuel L. Jackson.) Oh, you want to write? There are thousands of writers out there. What makes you think you’ll make it? Good point, you think, and give it up, wisely saving your efforts for more productive endeavors. Oh, you want to start exercising? What’s the point? Most people fall short of their exercise goals and give it up anyway; you might as well hang it up now and save yourself the heartache. Too right, you think, and cancel your gym membership.

But where do those voices of doubt and dissent come from? Sure, there are haters out there that will poop on your dreams and ask you to thank them for it, but the louder, more convincing voices are the ones in our own heads. I know I can speak for myself when I say I’m my own worst critic. The voice in my head that tells me I can’t do things speaks like Morgan Freeman with a 50,000-watt station broadcasting down to the very marrow of my soul. It’s overbearing, constant, undeniable. How do I overcome it?

By pretending.

I’m not an expert writer, but I can pretend to be one. And I can bang out over 1,000 words a day on average despite my full-time job and part-time daddy duties as if I were an expert writer. And I can shovel out advice like a steamshovel about my experience and pretend to know what I’m talking about to give the illusion that I actually do know what I’m talking about. Because that’s what experts do. They look confident. They walk the walk and talk the talk. You wanna be that thing? You have to start doing the thing.

Nobody’s born a brilliant novelist. No athlete pops out of the womb running ultramarathons. The people that do those things have the same voices of doubt that you or I have. The human experience, for all its vast variations, striations, complications and salutations (whatever, I ran out of good rhymes), is actually pretty standard. We get a life, we get some challenges, and we either overcome them, or we don’t. If you want to get ahead, you have to learn to be a con man.

But not so that you can run a swindle on some unsuspecting rubes. (Though I guess that helps, too.) The con you want to run — the long con that you work for years and years — is on yourself. You have to fool that inner voice of doubt into believing that you’re not to be doubted anymore. You have to fake it til you make it. That means pretending to be the thing you want to be, every day, in public and in private, until one day it’s no longer a con and you are that thing.

Wanna be a writer? Write buckets of garbage. Drivel, drivel, drivel. Pile it on and pile it on and write boring stories and hackneyed narratives and cliched tripe and nonsensical dialogue until one day, when you’re not even thinking about pretending to be a writer anymore, you’re simply writing because that’s what you do now, you write something and it’s not half bad, and your inner voice of doubt will say, as if you’ve just demonstrated that the world is not, in fact, flat, as he previously believed, “oh. Well… I guess that makes sense, then.” And BLAM KAFIZZLE, you’re a writer.

Wanna be a runner? Get outside and run until you can’t anymore, and then stop and walk home. Then do it again. And again. And again and again and again, until you can run for a mile, and then for two miles, and then one day you’ll be out for your daily torture session, except you’ll realize it’s not actually torture anymore, it’s rather enjoyable, come to think of it, and you’ll start looking forward to those runs. And when people ask you what you’re doing this weekend you’ll respond airily, with a casual wave of your hand like you’re just going out for eggs, “oh, I’m going out for a 10k this morning,” and they’ll be all like “whoa, you’re running in a race?” and you’ll be all “no, that’s just what I do — I’m a RUNNER NOW.” And you’ll stomp on their toes for emphasis. Or maybe not. The stomping is optional, though it sends a good, strong message.

Point is, all the old adages are true. If you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right. A thing always seems impossible until it is accomplished. You have to fake it until you make it.

The power of sticktoitiveness (not a word, but yeah, totally a word I love) cannot be overstated. If you wake up every morning determined to accomplish a thing, and then take the steps and do the work necessary to take one step on that journey EVERY DAY, you can get there.

But what do I know? I’m not an expert.

I’m only pretending to be.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

A Narrative Sugar Rush

Pavowski2 Comments

Much of the process of writing is boring. Fun-boring, perhaps, the way that putting together a 1000-piece puzzle is fun if not YEAH LET’S GO FINISH THAT PUZZLE WOOO fun. You spend much of the time silently puzzling out the … puzzles … of how all the little fiddly bits fit together. If I want to have that character jump over a cliff to save his dog later in the novel, how do I foreshadow that moment earlier in the text? If that character has a deathly allergic reaction to oranges in chapter three, can I somehow twist that for the resolution in chapter twenty-seven?  My character seems to want to collect postcards from everywhere she visits by the end of chapter twelve… did I have her collecting the tongues of her vanquished foes instead in chapter eight? Better go back and revisit…

You slog through those moments, creating back story, laying foundations for the future, discovering odd little curiosities about your characters along the way, and meanwhile the story meanders forward not unlike a stream: a little cascade over rocks here, a long slow flow of calm water there, a spontaneous whirling eddy over here (not to be confused with Whirling Eddie, the circus performer)… but stories have a life of their own, and just as a somnambulant stream can turn into a vicious torrent with a summer storm, so too can a story surge to life with the proper impetus.

Like, oh, say, the hero deciding she’s had enough of the idiots around her spouting theoretical scientific mumbo-jumbo about time travel and alternate futures and the dangers of wandering through free-standing space-time portals without observing all applicable safety protocols, then running out of the safehouse she doesn’t believe is actually a safehouse, straight into the cold steel arms of one of the very robots the mad scientist was just warning her about.

Or, you know, something. Purely hypothetical, that. Definitely didn’t just write that in my new novel today, over lunch. Nope. No robots or mad scientists here. What are you looking at? Get away from my non-robot-involving, non-mad-scientist-featuring draft.

I wasn’t planning to write that moment today, but all of a sudden my hero decided she’d had enough of sitting around listening to exposition and decided to blow the story the fargo up by walking out of it (and of course, karmically, [is karmically a word?]) walking right into it.

I’ve enjoyed drafting the new novel, but today I couldn’t stop writing. Just like that moment where you can’t put the book down, I kept saying to myself, just one more sentence. Just one more paragraph. Just see what happens next. And I can’t wait for my next drafting session, wherein I’ll get to find out what does happen to my hero next. Because, while I have the general plot for the story mapped out, her getting captured by robots was not necessarily something I expected. Er, not captured by robots. She was, um. Inconvenienced. By… aphids. In her garden. Tomatoes. Very frustrating. No spoilers here.

But expected or not, I think you have to embrace these little detours when they crop up. Outlines are great, and having the end in mind is a fine way to craft a story, but I firmly believe that stories, like life, have minds of their own, and if authors don’t allow those stories a bit of leeway to stretch their legs and explore the side streets a little bit, well, you miss a lot of the fun along the way.

And, as always, I fully recognize that this particular diversion might suck. It might not work with the narrative as a whole. It might have to get cut completely from the book when I get down to the editing part. The sucky part. The I-want-to-kill-myself-with-white-out part.

But you can fix all that in post, as they say.

For now, it’s time to stop and smell the robots.

Roses. Smell the roses.

No robots here.

*hears the whir of servos*

*goes to investigate*

The Itch, or Why It’s Better To Just Go Ahead and Write Something, ANYTHING

PavowskiLeave a comment

Work was a beast today. Finals time, students are panicking, banging down my door, shoving papers in my face, “HERE GRADE THIS HASTILY SCRIBBLED TWO-MONTHS-LATE ASSIGNMENT SO I CAN PASS THE CLASS.” I debated a hundred times giving the lecture: “Had you done all your work at the appropriate time instead of, perhaps, staring gobsmacked into your cell phone when you should have been paying attention in class, then maybe you would have the grade you wanted and wouldn’t feel like the ant looking at the descending boot right now.” But that’s in vain, at this point. I’ve only been saying it for months. If they haven’t learned it from me by now, it ain’t gonna sink in today. Still, I don’t have to put the grades in until Monday. So maybe I’ll let those failing grades hang over their heads for the weekend, each of them enduring their own personal Sword of Damocles.

Anyway, I didn’t meet my writing goal today. This is not the end of the world (#writerproblems are not #realproblems) but it irked. It settled into my shoe like a microscopic bit of gravel and yanked at my mind throughout the afternoon and the evening, chewing on my thoughts like a voracious little psychic were-rabbit. Wrapped up my school day. Didn’t get your writing done. Went for another delightful trail run. There’s still writing to do. Got home, made dinner. You only wrote 500 words today. There’s still time. Made the final arrangements for tomorrow night’s soccer banquet. Only 100 more to make your bare minimum goal. You can cough up 100 words sitting on the toilet if you have to. Skyped with the wife and kids. They’d love you more if you would finish your writing. Watched a bit of TV, because goldfinger it, I deserve that. Slacker. How dare you consume media when you could be CREATING media. Shut everything down and headed for bed.

Oh, that’s cute. You think I’m going to let you sleep, knowing you only have to write 100 words to shut me up?

I could be joking, but I’m not. I feel like a total and abject failure as a writer if I have the opportunity to get it done and I don’t get it done. I feel no comparable sense of shortcoming for virtually anything else in my life. Didn’t get that stack of papers graded? They’ll keep til tomorrow. Yard didn’t get mowed today? Grass’ll still be there in the morning. Pets haven’t been fed lately? They could stand to lose a few pounds. (Let’s sidebar and establish that I don’t actually starve my pets, okay? THIS IS FACETIERY, PEOPLE. And, yeah, okay, fine, facetiery isn’t a word, but dag derg it, it should be.)

So I lay in bed for twenty minutes, eyes shut, focusing on the soothing sounds of the rumbling thunderstorm simulated by the white noise machine on the bedside table (how I ever slept in my life without one of these I will never know), completely failing to fall asleep, because the voice wouldn’t shut up. 100 words. Just 100 words. 100 words and you’d be done. If you weren’t a failure, you’d write the 100 words. Come on. You’ll feel better if you write a little bit. Just a little bit. Just 100 words. Come on. COME ON. GET UP AND WRITE. DON’T BE A B–“

So I got up. But I can’t write just 100 words, so I ended up writing 300. Then I had a good idea for something that should really happen earlier in the story, so I wrote another hundred words or so of notes to myself about what I need to go back and establish at a prior juncture. Then I remembered another couple of things I wanted to have happen at this leg of the narrative, so I doubled back and added them in as well. All told, I ended up writing about 600 words in the story, to add to the 500 I wrote before, so not only did I make my goal, I took a victory lap as well.

And what’s a victory lap deserve? Another victory lap on the blarg, because now my mind is racing and won’t shut up, and I have to spin off this mental energy somewhere. So there’s another 700 words of blarg drivel before I fall asleep.

If writing is my new addiction, I think I can live with it.

Trail Fail Becomes Trail Win

PavowskiLeave a comment

The wife and kids have been out of town for almost a week, and daddy has been able to get a lot of things done. Lots of writing (on the novel, if not so much around here), lots of things around the house (knocking a few things off the ol’ honey-do), lots of things I don’t normally get the chance to do.

Like trail runs.

Living in suburbia and working a more-or-less typical 9-to-5 schedule, then coming home and being a daddy, I don’t have a lot of time to get away. I love running for its simple step-out-the-front-door-and-go nature, but of course, stepping out the front door gets me to only a limited number of possible routes I can run. There’s the mall loop, which I’ve completed more times than even bear counting. There’s a slightly longer circuit that takes me around the local strip malls. Then, on the weekend, I stretch that loop out and roll through downtown, over to the train tracks and past a bunch of mom n’ pop businesses over closer to the railroad tracks.

But I’ve run all of those routes dozens, if not hundreds of times. My feet practically slide into their own custom-made grooves in the pavement. Not much adventure there, outside of dodging the traffic, of course. So the chance to switch things up without having to hurry home for my daddy responsibilities is too tempting to pass up.

We have some good parks and good trails around here, and I’ve run several of them during races and the occasional weekend sneak away, but not nearly regularly enough. There’s nothing quite like trading in your roadside stomps for covered bridges…

wpid-20150509_091144.jpg

Cascading rapids…

wpid-20150509_093858.jpg

And enough greenery to make you feel like hugging a tree, or maybe eating one:

wpid-20150509_091438.jpg

So I’ve set off for a few of them over the past few days. And I’ve learned a few things.

First of all, trails are hellish and heavenly on your feet. Hellish because you hit all kinds of rocks and roots and bumps and sudden drops and hidden steps and any number of obstacles that you don’t hit on the roads. I’m embracing my minimalist shoes again when my feet feel fit (which has been a lot, lately), so I really feel all the bumps in the road. The trails are leaving me with hot spots in my feet — not pain, but soreness and tenderness — which is actually rather a good feeling despite the discomfort. Like a scar after a knife fight, sort of a badge of pride, a proof that I was there and I went through something. Then again, the trails are heavenly, because there’s none of that non-compactable asphalt or concrete underfoot. It’s all dirt or grass or a lush, springy bed of fallen pine needles and leaves pillowing my feet along, like the fingers of angels ferrying me to happiness. Sweet and sour.

Second of all, and more importantly: with trails, you have to know what you’re doing. I checked out maps beforehand and figured I knew pretty much what I was looking out for — the trail goes in such and such general direction for about a half mile, then follows the river for a bit, then cuts back inland toward the rocks shaped like a couple of donkeys humping — but the problem is, when you’re out there surrounded by nothing but green, one donkey hump rock looks pretty much like another, and judging distance is about as easy as cross stitching blindfolded. (Is that hard? It sounds hard.)

Long story short, I got lost. Day 1 I got a little lost and increased my estimated distance by about a half mile, running 3.7 when I meant for a little 5k. That’s no big deal. Saturday, though, I was aiming for 4 miles and ended up running almost six. Which is fine if I’m in shape, which I’m not, because I’ve been nursing my plantar-fasciitis beset right foot back to health. Not only did I increase my mileage spontaneously, but I did it over some of the toughest terrain around: the riverside trails of Sweetwater Creek State Park. Now, there’s beautiful scenery to be seen, and in fact, you’ve probably seen some of the terrain I was running on…

That’s the New Manchester Mill Ruins, and Katniss and what’s-his-beak make an appearance there when they’re in District 13 in Mockingjay, Part 1. (Let’s not talk about the nonsense of splitting any of the books in that series into two movies. Let’s just not.) The trails at Sweetwater go past this relic and up and down some sheer rock faces as they follow Sweetwater Creek past rapids and on into lonely meandering stretches of the river. Really, really gorgeous area.

And I got so lost. My first warning sign was these stairs:

wpid-20150509_093003.jpg

It’s hard to get a sense of scale, but I’m pretty sure those stairs are equivalent to a seventeen-story building.

I had just gotten finished climbing what felt like a 30 degree incline for about a quarter mile up — so steep and so long I was literally pushing my knees down with my hands to keep going — when I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was or which way was back. Luckily, about that time, a guy and his dog (seriously) came running through a field of brilliant sunny daffodils. He and his pup are regulars, and he was able to point me back to relative civilization: “Oh, just go that way for about two miles, and you’ll see the signs guiding you back in.” This, when I was already at the 4 mile mark for my 3-and-a-half-mile run.

Well, not to belabor the point, but I did make it back. My feet were trashed from six miles in my minimal shoes and I was sweating like the traditional whore in church, but man, there’s something to be said for the journey. I ran almost six miles and did some serious hiking for at least an additional mile in there, and it was simultaneously the toughest workout and most rewarding and enjoyable running experience I’ve had, maybe since I ran my first half marathon. Just pure fun and happiness, despite how beat-up I was afterward. I’ve heard the term “runventure” before, and I always thought it was a little dumb and ridiculous, but this particular run, I think, qualifies.

Anyway. Point is, if you’re going to go running a trail — especially if you don’t usually go running trails — maybe bring a map.

Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe don’t.