On Understudies

Question the First: What do you do if you can’t fit under the desk?

The problem with understudying is that your position is, by definition, expendable.  Not you, yourself, no.  And not actually the position of understudy, either.  But in the most perfect world, in the best case scenario, you would never show up for your job and you would never be missed because, ideally, you are never needed.

This is why no one wants to be a professional understudy.

There’s a poem by Michael Dumanis called “Professional Extra” that makes me think I should write a poem about a professional understudy.  His poem encapsulates the pathos of someone whose job it is to be the eternal also-ran, who fleshes out the cities of our lives, those people we brush past on the sidewalk, who fill our airports, who, in this case, populate our movies so that they look like living, breathing reality.

Any poem I would write about a professional understudy would underscore the pride that person must take in their job – to always be ready to go on, to know all the lines, to be perfectly the character that no one else will see.  There’s sadness there, to be sure, in never being the one whom the audience wants to see, but also simple acceptance of a necessary, a crucial job.
What is the understudy for?  To make sure that the show goes on.

Question the Second: How many people can you be at once?

Current psychological trends have it that we are always different people.  That, essentially, we are never ourselves (plural both grammatically awkward and tonally correct) because whenever we are confronted with a different person, we present a different side of who we are.

Of course, the sense of having different sides implies that there’s an object being defines.  Just as the elephant in a dark room is a creature with skin like bark OR a snake-like monstrosity OR a pointy, hard-shelled crustacean, so are we, this theory would have it, a single person who can only be seen in bits and pieces.

But it seems to me that that idea is a hopeful fallacy.  If we are always presenting only parts of who we are to the people around us (a different me to every individual person; further, a different me to every possible combination of people) then we are never truly ourselves.  Even when alone.

As I write this, I’m alone in our apartment and so more closely myself than with anyone around.  But even here I’m writing to YOU and YOU are defining, in a very real sense, who I am.  Not by your actions, obviously, but by who I imagine you to be and through how I want you to perceive me.

Like atoms, we are determined by observation.  Without someone to look inside the box, there’s no telling whether we are alive or dead.  Without someone gauging where we’re going, there’s no telling where we are.  Without someone to listen to us, there’s no telling what we sound like.

Shortcut #31: Malinche’s Daughter

Carmela said, “It just bothers me that so much of the writing world works that way.  Through connections, rather than talent.”

I said, “But there are different kinds of connections.  Meeting someone at a conference, say, and finding out you like that person and therefore you want to be friends with them and lo and behold! you like their work, too.  That’s a lot different than homing in on people to talk to because of their FAME or their POSITION or, in short-shorts, WHAT THEY CAN DO FOR YOU.”

And if you’re wondering how all those caps worked themselves into my speech, I’ll just say it was several hundred dollars worth spent sedated in the dentist’s chair.

But seriously folks—

Shortcut #31: Michelle Otero’s Malinche’s Daughter

I’ve only been to two conferences, and at each one I’ve picked up a slew of books by people I’d never heard of before and who I find out, upon reading their books, that I’ve been missing out.  Of course, I didn’t know I was missing out on, which means I didn’t really feel bad about the missing at the time I was missing (unlike when I was left behind by my friends when they went to see a movie without me because I was late) so now I am retroactively inserting that sense of “missing out” into my past, all for your benefit.

And at these conferences you also meet the writers who you didn’t know you were missing out on and are now trying to rectify that literary discrepancy.  And, often, you might (okay, I’m talking about me here) buy a book simply because of my interaction with the writer as a person, not because I have yet been inoculated by their words.

Malinche’s Daughter is a chapbook by Michelle Otero (published by Momotombo Press) that collects a number of essays about Otero’s experiences working with women in Oaxaca who have been sexually abused, and dealing with the fallout of her own sexual abuse.

Put like that, the chapbook sounds like a heavy read.  And it is, but not because of statistics or particular descriptions of abuse.  This isn’t a book of reportage.  This isn’t an eyewitness account.  This isn’t a plea for recognition of abuse or a diatribe against abuse or even a call to action for everyone to come together, as one, and stop sexual abuse.

All of those elements are in Malinche’s Daughter, but what Otero focuses on, and what makes her writing powerful, is her focus on the experience of the individual, and the emotions that embed themselves in those individuals like scars.  Not like scars – the emotions are scars.

Otero’s writing is rich with images and stippled with sharp moments of observation that bring the lives of survivors of sexual abuse into sharp focus.  These moments outline what it is like to be a survivor, how one’s life changes, how a person changes to deal with that new life, and what strength it takes to work one’s way back to a sense of normalcy.  No, not normalcy – peace.  No, not peace – awareness.

Otero is working on a memoir at the moment (she updates her progress here) and I look forward to when it’s done.  What she brings with her writing is a palpable humanity, a well of compassion, and a willingness, however hard it is for her and for us, to see the world for what it is, not what we wish it to be.

On My Fascination With Ionesco: Rhinoceros edition

Rhinoceros is the first play of Ionesco’s that I read, and I believe it’s a good introduction for the uninitiated.  Of course, I may change that opinion once I finish rereading his earlier (and shorter) plays, but my memory of those works (The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, The Chairs and the like) is that they are more out-and-out absurdist, which, in this case, I mean to mean nonsensical.  As a reader or an audience member you have to take the play symbolically to make any sense of the action on stage, and the words, well, the words might as well be in another language for all you care.  And, to be honest, I’m surprised at you and your carelessness.

Rereading Rhinoceros reminds me what a debt I owe to Ionesco, and how much what I’ve been trying to accomplish in my own plays has been subconsciously influenced by what I read back when I was first putting keyboard to dialogue.

1. An interest in overlapping dialogue.
2. An attention to language as truth that trumps both character and action (i.e., it defines both).
3. A focus on alienation.
4. A fascination with the mixing of the theatrical and the real.

Although, to be honest, none of the above is consciously why I found myself attracted to Ionesco or, to be more exact, to Rhinoceros.

This play details the slow taking over of a small French town by rhinoceroses.  Or rhinoceri.  Rhinocerati.

But this isn’t simply the same tired old story of a town taken over by animals.  We’ve all read and seen and heard that a thousand times.  No, this play involves the inexplicable transformation of the town’s residents into rhinoceroses.  At first these transformations seem the result of a plague, people falling left and right into beasthood, but then it slowly dawns on the characters that this particular form of rhinoceroshood is chosen, not afflicted, and that the reasons for one’s choosing to become an animal are as varied as the number of people becoming.

Of course, the first act of this three act play reveals none of this.  All we see is a slice of an ordinary day in the town where Berenger, our hero, lives.  Ordinary but for a rampaging rhino who, it must be said, tramples a cat to death.

What’s most remarkable to me about this first act is the use of repetition and echoing, how when the rhinoceros runs past all the characters (except Berenger) say, “Oh, a rhinoceros!” and then “Well, of all things!”  Now, in terms of literary analysis, this echoing has been used to reinforce the sense that the play is an attack on fascism, though in the play what it does is simply and effectively set up the conflict between individuality and collectivism, the single person versus the crushing pressure to conform to society’s expectations.

All and good.  But what I absolutely love about this play, and Ionesco in general, is the verbal play.

Berenger: It would have never entered my mind.
Jean: You have no mind!
Berenger: All the more reason it would never enter it.

And:

Logician: Another syllogism.  All cats die.  Socrates is dead.  Therefore Socrates is a cat.
Old Gentleman: And he’s got four paws. That’s true.  I’ve got a cat named Socrates.

And:

Berenger: There are more dead people than living.  And their numbers are increasing.  The living are getting rarer.

And, my favorite:

Jean: Instead of squandering all your spare money on drink, isn’t it better to buy a ticket for an interesting play?  Do you know anything about the avant-garde theatre there’s so much talk about?  Have you seen Ionesco’s plays?
Berenger: Unfortunately, no.  I’ve only heard people talk about them.
Jean: There’s one playing now.  Take advantage of it.

It’s Ionesco’s language that keeps me moving through his plays, not so much his plots.   His language and the ideas that power the plays – ideas that are often as not decentralized from the major conflict, appearing from the mouths of the characters like spokes from the hub that the action revolves around.

Rhinoceros convinced me of the power of language in theater, and how that language, properly used, can create everything else a play needs to be successful: plot, conflict, pathos.  And this hunger for language is what drove me towards being a playwright.

In short, for all I do, blame Ionesco.  He won’t mind.

Mostly because he’s dead.

On Having Lied About What I Would Write About Today

Sorry for all of you Ionesco enthusiasts who were dying to hear about my thoughts re: his most famous play Rhinoceros that would’ve been quickly followed in the days ahead by thoughts re: The Killer and a number of his short(er) plays.  That will all just have to wait a day.

Today I’ll be talking about theater.  Not the theater, the physical space, or theater in terms of plays, but theater’s essence: co-operation.

Theater is a co-operative art.  If you didn’t know that, go back to school, get out of the kitchen, find yourself a job as an accountant, or a hermit.

The bare truth is that theater is a co-operative – or, to use another, more popular word – collaborative art.

In terms of writing, I think of collaboration as two writers working together to create a single text.  I’ve always shied away from this sort of work – if something isn’t completely “mine” then I find it hard to treat it as seriously and with as much attention as I do those other works that are completely mine (my creation, and my responsibility if they end up failures).  And it’s true that I’ve written a few plays in high school and college that were collaborations in this sense.  And though I’m writing collaborations now with the poet Michelle Schmidt, those are two-part poems with a clear (to us) separation between who wrote what – more simultaneous and related poems than pure collaborations.

But I’ve always been blind to how much theater is a collaborative art.  That is to say, the collaborative nature of theater never turned me off of writing for the theater.

In essence, this is because a play – unlike a movie or, especially, a TV show – can be, and is expected to be, performed by a number of different people over the course of its life on the stage.  A certain run of a production, no matter how long it is, is only one run in one city in one country during one very specific length of time.  If it goes badly, or if I don’t like the particular slant of a director, the show can always be produced again.

But in that particular production, oh, well, your reliance on others is absolute.  Especially once the run begins and audiences are let into the theater, each member of the company, actor or techie, relies on each other one absolutely.  This is especially the case in smaller, fly-by-night, avante garde companies of which, essentially, Theater 42 counts itself a member.

Which is to say that today we had to cancel a show.  An actor couldn’t make it to the theater by the time the show was to go on, or even within a reasonable amount of time after the show was to already have started, and so the play had to be canceled.  Which means we had to turn our prospective audience away and, unfortunately, five-sixths of the possible audience has plans for next weekend which make this performance they missed the only possible one for them to attend.

Now, I’ll admit, our audiences haven’t been big.  We’re a new theater company, and Houston isn’t a big theater scene, and, as with most companies, we need to build an audience.  Megan, for her part, suggests that an audience will grow because we’re offering (in her POV) something that no one else is.  But the thing is that building an audience means that you have to attract new people to your productions, people who aren’t friends or family and who have no real idea of who you are.

Today we had two people filling that theoretical audience who found out about us through the Houston Press write-up and they (well, not them specifically, but people like them) are the future of Theater 42.

And that’s what depresses me most about today’s non-performance.

And that’s why I ended up playing Darkest of Days for several hours and found myself disappointed with that game for what it could have been (though that’ll be fully explored in a future Shortcut).

And that’s why I’m meditating on collaboration in theater and how – without understudies, without fallback plans, without insurance – avant garde theater lives up to the military origin of the term in that, when things get rough, it’s the first to fall.

Tomorrow: Ionesco: Rhinoceros.

On My Fascination With Ionesco

I don’t really know why I love Ionesco so much.  I think much of my admiration-fascination-obsession with him as a playwright comes from him being my first real exposure to absurdism in the theater.

Along with all the creative writing we students were required to do as part of the School of the Arts regimen, we were also trained in academic writing, from timed essays (where I first learned the five-paragraph model that served me well during college’s timed exams) to research papers.  The first research paper I remember doing was on Eugène Ionesco.

I don’t remember what I wrote about him – and extant copies of the paper, undoubtedly rightfully so, no longer exist.  All I know is that I was fascinated with him… not so much for his earlier plays like The Bald Soprano and The Lesson but for his later plays in all their straggly glory.  Oh.  Rhinoceros.

[Bless you. –ed.]

No, I didn’t sneeze.  I said Rhinoceros.

[Bless you again –ed.]

No, you see that’s the name of the first of Ionesco’s plays I read.  I think it was assigned in class, but out of that reading my fascination grew like a week.  All because of a little (well, full-length) play called Rhinoceros.

[Maybe you should be home in bed if you’re that sick. –ed.]

I’m not – maybe if I just ignore you, you’ll go away.

[You’re welcome to try it. –ed.]

So, what drew me to Ionesco first, I think, was the premise of… the play about the one-horned mammal.

[The Unicorn? –ed.]

No, of course not.  The rhinoceros.

[Bless you. –ed.]

So, it was the premise of that play that curried my favor, and then the wordplay in his plays that kept me interested.  Ionesco is a master of misunderstanding, his characters often lost in a Kafka-esque universe where they think, at first, that they know what’s going on but are quickly proven wrong by the events that whirl around them.  I was seduced by the plays where Ionesco is himself a character on stage, either arguing with himself or with critics.  I was entranced by the use of the same main character (Bérenger) in four plays, and how those Bérengers aren’t related to each other at all, i.e. the plays don’t add up to a unified whole.  I was wrapped around Ionesco’s finger by his use, in The Killer, of a character who didn’t exist, who, according to the script, is shown just by clothing hung from wires.

I’ve never seen an Ionesco play performed, and I’m not sure I would enjoy one if I did.  His plays exist so fully in my mind that they could never live up to what I’ve already imagined.

That being said, in the next few days I’m going to try and explain what’s in my mind so that you, too, can be spoiled.

Tomorrow: Rhinoceros.

[Bless you. –ed.]

Oh, shut up.

On Comedy and Drama

Did I ever tell you why I started writing comedies?

[No. And Probably for good reason. –ed.]

I started writing comedies because you receive an instantaneous ballot on whether or not they are successful.  A joke flies or falls flat – and, honestly, most jokes fall flat – and you bask in the laughter or suffocate in the silence.

[I said, Probably for good reason. –ed.]

When I first started writing, I thought drama was the way to go.  I’m naturally serious (when I’m not joking – and usually my joking sounds like I’m being serious) and I think that serious issues are the most important for human consumption (unless you have consumption, in which case: humor) or at least I did when I was fourteen.

[Could you please contract consumption?  For me? –ed.]

When I was fourteen, I was enrolled in the School of the Arts, a literary-focused magnet school program that took up two classes of the day and that, as one of its requirements, required its students to write a play a year AND submit that play to Virginia’s Young Playwrights Festival.  The first play I wrote was titled “The War” and was three acts long.  And three pages.

[Oh, if only you’d held on to your instinctual brevity! –ed.]

It was a dramatic piece about a king and his second-in-command and how they die and are betrayed and blah blah blah who cares and even if you do care I don’t know it because you’re not laughing.  Laugh, damn it!  Laugh!

[Ha. –ed.]

My next play was called “The Tower of Iron Will” and told the story of a guy named Will who wanted to ask a girl out, but couldn’t work up the courage.  His Ego, Superego, and Id have a battle royale onstage until he manages to break through the “tower” of his self-protectiveness.  I actually had this play performed in high school, and it was, well… received.

[Ha. –ed.]

But that was a serious play as well, and still didn’t provide the sort of visceral feedback that a growing theatrical artist needs!  And so: humor.  By this time I’d read (through the School of the Arts) a number of Shakespeare plays (at least three… which is all you really need, right?  Right?) and realized that the serious could co-exist with the comic, if properly garbled.  And I’d read Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and, through that, understood that the serious and the comic don’t even have to be separated by distinct scenes, that the serious and the comic can co-exist within the same line.  To wit, what is seriously depressing can also be heartbreakingly funny.  Or the reverse.

[Please, oh please, reverse. –ed.]

So the next year I wrote a play that had comedy in it.  Not very good comedy, mind you (Hello, “Clouds”) but comedy, nonetheless.  And there was laughter.  And all was right with the world.

[I believe you’re wrong. –ed.]

See, the benefit of comedy is that, as the writer/director/actor you don’t have to wait for the audience to praise you – they do so through their laughter – and as the audience you don’t have to worry about staying after the show is over to lavish your praise upon the cast and crew – they already know.  The trouble with drama is that there’s no revelation of success unless the audience breaks down into tears.

[I’m crying on the inside. –ed.]

Success!

And Now A Word From Our Sponsors

It’s amazing both how little the arts are supported in the U.S. and how much they are supported, a contradiction that I, in the following slew of words, will attempt to elucidate.

Sometimes it seems that to make it in this world as an artist – and by that I mean someone who makes a living or, well, is known as an artist rather than someone who does art on the side – you have to sell out.  And I know that selling out has a bad connotation but, really, selling out means that you have something that people want to buy in the first place anyway.  The truth is that there are simply some artists, writers, musicians, etc. who cannot sell out because their art is not saleable.  Others are more in tune with the zeitgeist and their work slides down the gullet of the masses like thickly-buttered hotcakes.

And I’m not saying I’m in one camp or the other – though most of the time I prefer my work to be saleable.  No, scratch that.  All the time.

The trouble is, I also want the freedom to write whatever the hell I want.

The good news is that I’m able – RIGHT NOW! – to write whatever the hell I want to write.

The bad news is that I’m not being paid for such uninhibited, though undoubtedly brilliant, writing.

The proof that it’s undoubtedly brilliant?  I’m not getting paid for it.  And how many brilliant writers have died penniless in garrets, their work only to be discovered after their bones have been interred in the pauper’s graveyard outside of the major or minor city that they called home?  Plenty.  Plenty, I say!  And, I, too, can be one of them!

Granted, the reason I began with the funding paradox is that I have been lucky enough to get a lot of support over the past few (ten?) years as a writer.  University creative writing programs in the U.S. essentially work as government (and private) funding for writers.  While in those programs I received several fellowships that allowed me to worry less about what I was going to eat and more about what I was going to write.  Last year I was granted a fellowship from the Houston Arts Alliance for the production of a new book of poems.  This year, I started Theater 42 with Erin Kidwell and we’ve benefited from regular benefits sponsored by the Poison Girl and Boheme bars.  That’s a lot of support for an individual, and more than enough to fully sponsor Theater 42’s first production (i.e., “Tuned to a Dead Channel” which is going on now, check your local listings).

But overall, much, much more money goes towards defense, corporations, blah blah blah, you’ve heard this argument before and if it didn’t convince you then, then it won’t now.  It comes down to whether you think arts are a vital part of our lives – as if they didn’t exist, then culture and civilization would die – or whether you believe arts are just the icing on the cake of humanity.  Remember, when baking humanity, preheat the oven to 11000 degrees and let sit for several billion years or so.

So, to those of you who believe that arts are essential and desperately want to support the arts: I’m right here.

All of my skin is available for your socially-conscious-and-artistically-inclined advertising needs.

On Being Late For A Very Important Date

Namely, this one, that I’m postdating this essay to.  Yes, oh yes, I posted this essay yesterday, didn’t you notice?  I mean, I posted it today.  Today!

Don’t you argue with me!

Do you want to know what I’ve been doing all day?   Preparing for you.

Yes, you.

Preparing for what you may ask?  And you may.  Ask, that is.

Don’t be shy.  You know I’m talking about “Tuned to a Dead Channel”, that play that’s sweeping the nation and being paid minimum wage to do it.  Be the first on your block to own a ticket to “Tuned to a Dead Channel”, penned by that famous unknown, Meister Doctor Andrew Kozma!  Believe you me, it’ll be worth tens come twenty years from now.

Okay, enough kidding around. (I’m not really kidding.)  What I did today was create sounds for the play.  Yes, me, the writer, was creating “sounds” for the play.  As we all know, the only sounds a writer should be making are the clacking of keys.  So, audience o’ mine, now you know what to expect come curtain a calling.

I don’t have a good track record being a member of the technical theater brotherhood-and-sisterhood-live-in-harmony hood.  My first job after graduating college was as a technical theater guy in some plays that my friend (and Equity stage manager extraordinaire Heather) was stage managing.  And, yes, she is the reason I got those jobs.  And, boy, was she disappointed.

Besides my total ineptness at being a prop procurer, I also was inattentive as a sound technician.  At the time, all my job involved was pressing a button so that the next cue would play right on cue.  Queue?  Quebecois?

Regardless, I messed up.  Sound played when no sound should be playing.  Now, lights, you can sort of get away with.  Aha!  A dramatic shift in lighting!  How unexpected, and symbolic!

But sounds, especially if they are recordings of people talking, or music, or anything, really, that comes through the speakers as opposed to an actor’s mouth, sounds can be a bit distracting.  And that’s how I distracted – cue unqueued played on Q.

Which is why we have decided to go with no sound for “Tuned to a Dead Channel”.  Really, I think it’s best.  And who cares?  Who do?  You do.

Cue applause.

Applause?

Production Log: “The Aliens Are Coming!” (Part 3)

So, considering what I’ve talked about over the past few days concerning non-fiction, faulty memory, non-fiction, faulty memory, non-fiction, repetition, and my faulty memory, what exactly does one (i.e. I) do about the problem?

The No-Memory-Of-What-I-Was-Like Problem

Well, who was I?  And if I don’t know, then who does?

These are good questions (and there answers are necessary to the writing of the essay), so I better find someone who can answer them.  Namely: my mom.

My mom is the one who told me about the changes wrought in me, so who better to tell me what I was like before?  In non-memoir terms, this is what’s called research.  In memoir terms, this is what’s called prying.  Of course, when you are prying into your own past, you are the only one who can rightfully call yourself a nosy, good-for-nothing, intervening little prick.

And if you’re calling yourself that (I’m looking at you, You) then you have more pressing problems.

Of course, there’s another option.  I like to call it “imagination”.

What was I like as a child?  What, taking my mom’s comments as a guide, would I have been like?  What do I wish I was like?  All of these and more can be your (my!) memories of yore!

The Paucity-Of-Memories Problem

So… that suggestion I made for the last problem also works here.

Mom: You’re going to make memories up?  But I gave you such good ones!

Yes, but I don’t remember them.

Mom: Ungrateful brat.

By the way, reader o’ mine, this isn’t my real mom.

Mom: I’m not?

No.

Mom: Ungrateful—

See, the benefit of making up memories is that you get to make up ones that don’t have anything to do with reality but have everything to do with themacity.

Mom: Did you make that up, too?

Yes.

Mom: If you make something up, how is it still non-fiction?

Good question.

Mom: Are you going to answer it?

No.

The More-Philosophical-Than-Narrative Problem

Okay, I’ll answer it.

It’s not that I’m making up memories so much as I’m putting flesh to what is likely a memory, or what is half a memory, or what I know to be true but don’t remember.

Granted, when this happens, I usually make the distinction clear to my readers (Hi, Brendan!), and since most of my non-fiction pieces are about or involve the quicksilver quality of memory (i.e., it’s a metal and it is poisonous) these partial truths fit right in.

Of course, that doesn’t answer the more-philosophical-than-narrative problem.

That problem seems to be a result of writing poetry for so long, and the fact that my poetry has come more and more to resemble image-laced monologues.  What I mean is that each is voice-driven, and that voice takes precedence over narrative.  And that each is language-rich, and that language may be focused on words rather than scenes, verbal wit and images rather than physical handles the reader’s mind can build pictures from.

This tendency works (at least part of the time) in poems because poems are language vehicles, bullets of thought rather than of plot.  A poem can hook a reader on the sound of the words while an essay has to hook a reader on the thought itself, and those thoughts, in essays, need to be dressed in scenes.

So, what I need to do is go back and pick out a wardrobe.  The thoughts underlying my points about aliens, alienation (from both the self and the other), the development of the self, and the limits of knowledge are already there (mostly) in the essay.  What I need now are the scenes that keep a reader hooked over the course of six thousand words, the narrative that drives readerly curiosity.

And now wait, with baited breath, as Andrew prepares his blog for publication, having only eight minutes before the day is done and his wager is lost and the Green Knight comes to take his reward.  Wish him luck.

Or not.  You know, whatever holds your interest.

Production Log: “The Aliens Are Coming!” (Part 2)

I started writing this essay a few years ago.  The story and the urge to write it out had a two-part genesis.  The first is that my memory has never been good.  The second is that there’s this change that happened to me when I was between eight and ten (the years that my family lived in Germany) that I don’t understand.

MEMORY

Sure, I’ve been told how easy it is to upgrade your memory, but I’ve never been one for technological solutions to biological problems.  Also, I’ve never been one with tons of money.

Instead of jamming in some RAM, how about I explain the problem?  The problem is this: my memories, the further back you go, are less and less tangible.  Yes, I imagine this is the common state for most people, but I feel as though my memories are almost nonexistent.

There are certain memories (scenes?  scenarios?) that are staples of my childhood, that I’m pretty sure happened.  These memories are clear, and I’ve lived with them a long time, but that still doesn’t mean that I fully trust them.  I believed, for years, that I had a nail stuck in my head from a (dreamed) childhood accident.  If I could let that false memory in and embrace it fully, how many others might be lurking?

Still, I can’t doubt everything.  I remember finding a small pocket watch in an abandoned field close to the army base we lived on in Frankfurt.  There was a field down a ways under the overpass that some friends and I accidentally set on fire.  Crouching down to look at an anthill during a soccer game.  A dead cat resting, its eyes glossed over with frost, by the sidewalk in the Bundesbank Park.

But even with those memories accepted as real, there is so much of my past left unspoken for.  I know that my present memory is heavily weighted toward usefulness.  No, importance.  I can remember most, if not all, of my student’s names (two classes worth) within the first two weeks of class, but as soon as that final gradesheet is handed in to the department, the names pop like bubbles.  I’ll see a student just a few weeks after class has let out and have no idea what their name is.  But I’ll remember those who were engaging, who made themselves known both in class and through their work, who were people I be friends with if circumstances were different.

Does this mean that I don’t want to remember my childhood?  Or just that most of my childhood is unimportant to my adult life?  I tend to see my past self through the lens of my present self – it’s hard for me to imagine the way I was, as people often do when talking about how naïve they were in high school, or how precocious they were as a child.  But for me the Andrew of twenty-five years ago is much like the one of today, except smaller and weaker.

CHANGE

We all want to make it, but without a change machine or a bank we’re all pretty much out of luck.  Gone are the days when you could make the change yourself, dividing an ocho into its component pieces of eight in case all you wanted was a cup of coffee, keep the change, please.

Often we want to make changes to ourselves, physical or mental.  You want to stop smoking.  You want to stop drinking (as much).  You want to exercise more.  You want to save money.  You want to dress better.  You want to eat better.  You want to stop dating “bad” boys.

All of these changes are possible, but they just take work, and dedication, and attention, and, perhaps, some therapy.  But you know what you’re getting into when you begin the attempt to change, and you know the result you desire.

Sometimes, though, changes are made to us.

At some point while my family lived in Frankfurt, sometime between 1984 and 1986, when I was eight or nine or ten, I changed.  How do I know this?  Because my mom told me.

What I remember (see above) were night terrors (only one during this time, though prevalent when I was a child), bomb threats phoned in to the base school, and a conviction I had that aliens were going to invade the school.  Probably they’d invade the world, too, but they’d start with the school.

My non-fiction essay delves into all of the above.  What I wanted to mention here – and the reason for my writing the essay – is to explore the idea of an apparently well-adjusted and friendly child becoming withdrawn and paranoid.  No, not exactly that.  To explore what happened to me to make that change.  Even more specifically, my purpose is to document that change (in) myself.

My problem in writing the essay is that I have no memory of what I was like before the change, a paucity of memories from that time, and a writing style that’s moved, without my willing it, into being more philosophical than narrative.  Now, how does one (that 1 being I) work around these issues?  Find out through fixing your rabbit ears on this frequency.  Part three: Tomorrow!

And Now, as I Promised, How to Make a Million Before You Turn Thirty-Five:

First, you need a copier.