Narnia is Southwest Minnesota : A Haiku about Spring

It’s always winter


Never Christmas in Marshall

April snowstorms stink

Clan of the Broken Banner -- Pt. 1

I’m not crazy.

I have always had, or believed I had, this ability to see an event take place far away, as it was happening. Yesterday, for example, on my walk home from school,  I was supposedly caught in a day dream as my parental unit would say, and imagined what it would be like if a cougar came straight at me. In the middle of Lynnwood, this is highly unlikely and slightly dark, but I suppose that is all part of my “condition”.

 I imagined in my mind, taking a large piece of concrete that came free from a part of the sidewalk, and waving it at the cougar. When the feline would come too close, I’d bash its head in. I took this further in my day dream and imagined that I was in the woods, with my dog, if I had a dog, camping, and a cougar crossed my path. I would take out my trusty knife, if I had one, and perform the same menacing gestures towards the puma, warding it off.

When I got home, KOMO 4 at 4 was broadcasting a story of a boy who had saved his father from a mountain lion with nothing more than a hunting knife and a very loud voice. I would learn later that this was no coincidence; that my “condition” as my therapist called it, the quasi-schizophrenia, wasn't a condition, but a gift, and that my future was sealed to one of the greatest battles humanity would take part in, but never remember.  

I’m not crazy. 

Three Buckets of Better Business

Three Buckets of Better Business


Profits, people, and process these three buckets be

All blocking the path, between success and reality

Profits are needed, for business to succeed

But is impeded by the lack of customers, with wants and needs

Who are blocked by process, the bureaucracy of it all

Which can be removed by profits, and so we are at a stall

The old business model, is broken and useless

The financial and demand plans, its own hangman’s nooses

A new philosophy of problem solving, a paradigm shift

Is what will give our EBIT, its much needed lift

His Red Cape

Robert, my son has one thing he will not be parted from. His most favorite article of clothing is his red superman cape. He wears it everywhere; to school, to day-care, to church, to breakfast, to dinner, to his friend’s house, to grandma’s house, to the bath, to bed. His fascination for All-American Boy Scout, the Man in Blue, the Last Son of Krypton, goes beyond the point of boy-hood obsession, and verges on the precipice of schizophrenia.

Last week at the supermarket, my boy was sitting in the shopping cart as I was deciding which brand of spaghetti sauce to purchase. While I was debating if spaghetti should even be on the menu for that week, my boy put his hands up to his eyes like binoculars, and looked around.

“Mom, that lady gonna spill the cereal,” he said to me.

“You can’t see through walls,” I said nonchalantly, because I had said it a thousand times. Not one second after I said that, there was spill, a large one, in the aisle next to mine. I rushed over and saw an old woman lying down on the ground, the whole shelf of cereal fallen about her.

Captain Crunch mixed with Honey Nut Cheerios, shredded wheat mixed with all brands of chocolate covered breakfast delights, and in the midst of the General Mills medley, the woman lay on her back, unconscious. I called for help and before long, and checked for a heart rate. Long story short, the woman had a heart attack, was sent to the hospital and lived.

While on the way home from the grocery story, my son, placed his hands to his ears and looked out the window.

“Mom, the 7-11 is getting’ robbed by bad guys,” he said. I just shook my head.

“You’re hearing things. The 7-11 is fine,” I said.

“No mom, it’s getting robbed by bad guys. Wait, they’re gone now.”

That night, as I put my son to bed, I turned on the news. Sure enough, the woman in the grocery store made the local headline news at ten, and after that story, was the 7-11, and how it was robbed.

“Coincidence,” I told myself. I heard the fridge opening. Thinking it was my son, I walked to the kitchen to put him back to sleep.

Two men in ski masks with guns were helping themselves to the gallon of milk that I just bought. I looked at them too scared to move. They pointed theire guns at me and told me to sit in the chair. One of them grabbed my hair and pulled my head back.

“Hey!” I heard my son call out from the staircase. I looked, seeing him in his superman cape, glaring at the two intruders.

“Go back to bed Robert, Mommy is going to be fine!” I cried to him. One of the robbers snickered and ran after him. I screamed. Robert scrunched his face, put his fists on his hips and puffed out his chest. As the robber grabbed him, Robert spat in his face and then punched the robber between the eyes. The robber lost balance and fell backwards down the steps. Robert ran down and looked at the other intruder.

“You let her go!” he yelled, still maintaining his strong will. In a split second, the intruder pointed the gun at Robert and fired. I screamed, but Robert still stood, unharmed. I couldn’t watch. I clamped my eyes shut as the burglar emptied the clip into Robert. When I opened my eyes, Robert still stood, his fists on his side.

“What!” the burglar whispered.

“Let… her… go!” Robert said, calmly. The burglar did, and ran out the front door.

Robert, my son has one thing he will not be parted from. His most favorite article of clothing, his red superman cape… and that’s fine by me.

Arrogance and Naïveté : Generation Me

When you are finished reading, start reading again from the bottom up.

Arrogance:


They are endorsing them for skills never witnessed

They are listing skills that experience has never shared

College graduate, worked at a burger joint, skills of training and management

All they did was take cash at the window

Instruct the manager on how to make more burgers

Places fancy words behind it

The only passion was getting out, getting ahead, getting up,

Climbing, upward, higher and higher,

The rungs of the ladder, the backs of those who made a difference

Not knocking the foundation, but the entitlement of title and six figures

Perhaps the six figures should include the two digits after the decimal point

People with decades of experience, seeking new talent, new passion,

The experience will come is what is said,

The knowledge will come is what is said,

The salary will come, they hear,

The promotions will come they hear,

Trust the aged, and experience, the way will be clear,

Though they have never been to the top

They’ve seen it happen

Too much introspection, not enough retrospection

Perhaps there is underemployment

Perhaps too many jobs were passed by

Perhaps it is desperation

Perhaps it is realization

Realizing that they can only lead if they know where they are going

They can only know where you are going if they have vision

The only vision they see is success

They don’t know how to get there

And they don’t know the rules

Walking into the middle of a monopoly game

And they have brought chess pieces and a deck of cards

While checking the king in free parking

And cornering his queen on “Go”

And then claiming they’ve won

They haven’t won anything

Naïveté

The Writers Paradox

As writers, we require ourselves to write as much as possible, to get as many words down as possible, as if length was congruous with talent. Instead, we should require of ourselves to write as much as possible, in as few words as possible. For example, the first two sentences of my blog post could have been summed up with “Do more with less”.

Colleges and academia trained us to provide length, not talent, in our papers. How often did we hear,

“Please have for me by the end of the week a *enter number here* page report on *enter subject you don’t really care about here*.”

Or what about business professionals who spend hours of mind breaking working performing due diligence on a company, compiling a thirty page report filled with complex valuation formulas and projections just to watch the manager read the first paragraph, and then skip to the last page to see the summary?

The point is, as writers for quantity, not quality.

Pages and pages can be written for the greatest horror novel of all time, when one of the most horrific tales is one sentence.

                “He was the last man on earth and someone knocked on his door.”

This is comically ended with some sort of Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormon missionaries punch line, or my personal favorite was the pizza delivery guy.

On the other side of this paradox are the writers who have a story, possibly the greatest novel of the era crammed deep within the grey crevices of their brain, but are too afraid to write it. One main driver for not writing is the fear of failure, which will happen. You must accept the fact that failure is inevitable for the thirty year veteran and the two day novice. Embrace the failure, make your friend, invite it over for coffee, get into a long term relationship with it, have a fight, break up, get back together, say you’re sorry and that you will never leave, and then do the best possible thing ever… cheat on it with its best friend Success.

When I was taking a creative writing class and attempting to get my first book published, I received dozens of rejection letters (as was expected for any first attempt). My professor said “When you get a hundred rejection letters, you have a party.” The reason is that for each rejection letter you receive, you are that much closer to success. Rejection and failure are milestones that are to be celebrated.

So, as you take up your preferred writing apparatus, try to capture more meaning, with fewer words. One common rule is to write, and then cut a third.

Good luck in all your endeavors.

Pitfall: Plots, Not People.

One of my own most frequent pitfalls as a writer is writing about plots, instead of people. Anyone can write a plot, someone going from point A all the way to point N with a climax, falling action and untying of the knot. What takes talent, and what should end up in the hands of publishing houses, book shelves, and NYT Best Selling lists are stories about the individual and the fight within themselves.

I recently finished, well, sort of finished, two “thriller” novels. One was a thriller romance by Karen Harper and another was a government conspiracy thriller by Greg Iles. Both stories were well researched, but halfway through both books, I skipped to the ending, not because I wanted to know what was going to happen next, but because there was nothing within the pages that changed the Characters. Both books were written about plots, which were very interesting ideas, but at the end, the people, the characters, remained the same.

My wife and I recently finished the Hunger Games and we are selling them as soon as we can for two reasons. Too much gratuitous violence, and no one changes. Katniss is still Katniss, if maybe more broken, Peta is still Peta, Gale is still Gale, and Hamich is still District Twelve’s town drunk. Her second book was good, there was internal conflict, but not enough in my mind to save the series. My last post was about writing more with less. The Hunger Games could have been written as follows.

Book one: Kids kill kids for food or glory. Katniss and Peta defy the capital and both survive.

Book Two: Katniss loves two guys at the same time and justifies her actions.

Book Three: Practically everyone dies and Katniss chooses the one she can’t live without.

Another point of that my wife and I discussed was 50 Shades of Grey. Neither of us have the desire to read it, and frankly do not want that kind of literature in our home, but I am not sure which is worse: the fact that I can go to the local family friendly grocery store and pickup a porno in paperback form, or that it is a NYT best seller.

Perhaps my literary analysis skills are well below par, and perhaps I don’t know a good story when I see it, and perhaps readers have changed so that they don’t care about personal growth, development, rebirth, or anything that made stories memorable. But as I write, I make a challenge to authors, upcoming and experienced: make your stories about people and their internal struggles for rebirth. There is too much in the world about characters going through a gauntlet of trials, just to remain the same as they were in the beginning.