One of the first thing that Rish Outfield and I connected with back when we met in college was a mutual enjoyment of that goofy moment in "No Holds Barred" when Hulk Hogan beats up a bunch of guys, then finally comes for the guy in the car that they were all protecting. He rips the door off the car, and lifts the guy up by his lapels, and then notices the stink.
"What's that smell?" Hulk demands.
And in one of the greatest performances of modern cinema, the guy wails, "It's dookie!"
My description can't do it justice. Here, watch for yourself:
We've quoted that line back and forth to each other for more than twenty years now.
I just found a gem from the archives the other day. I've been going through all the old things that I've saved over the years and trying to scan them so that I have them readily available if I ever want to see them. I'm a memory pack rat. I save cards, ticket stubs, drawings my kids made, and a million other things too.
Letters are one of the things I like to hold onto, and while I was digging through a box of things, I found a letter from Rish from the days when he lived in L.A. and I lived in Sacramento. Sometimes we sent stories back and forth to each other. We mostly did it by email, but on occasion stories with notes in the margins or the like were actually mailed, and I found one of these letters from Rish that I had saved.
He'd sent me notes on a little kids' book that I'd written for my toddler son (the same kid that we had a birthday party for last night, who is now twenty years old, and a behemoth of a human being, making Big Anklevich look like Mini Anklevich). Along with those notes, he sent me this classic little hand drawn comic. Behold:
You see? This is the whole reason that I'm a memory pack rat. What can be more fun than digging through papers in an old box and finding something like this?
Ever since this quarantine shit began, my work has been doing their best to destroy any resolve I manage to muster for being healthy...as if it isn't hard enough to keep that going during this time of forced isolation. Every day, I come to work and there is another bunch of treats set out for us to gorge on. This awaits me every day:
So, imagine my surprise the other day when they finally provided a healthy option. I came in and found this box waiting on the table where they put out the treats:
With 1,000 pieces in there, I could eat for days, maybe even weeks. I'm pretty sure I'd lose weight while eating it. I would have to, right? There's way less calories and no sugar. Lots and lots of fiber in it too, I think, so it would help me with my digestion that has been completely destroyed by the endless flow of chocolate too.
The little guy has been cooped up in the house with no socialization or fun for a while. He didn't go over to friends' houses to play all that often before, but at least he got to see other kids when at school. Now, he's pretty bored.
I'm not one of those people who thinks that is one hundred percent a bad thing. I think a lot of our children don't get bored enough these days. There's always TV, video games, streaming apps, phone games, social media, and hundreds of other things constantly distracting them from the realities of the world. Kids need to be bored sometimes. It gives their mind a chance to stretch its legs and explore a little.
Little is pretty good with being bored. He's always looking for something interesting to do, and he loves to create with his hands. Today, his mind wandered to the boyhood joy of pirate treasure maps. He wanted to make his own, and create a treasure hunt. He asked me to print out some pirate paper for him, but I refused. I insisted that we make our own.
First, I had him crumple up a piece of printer paper, then smooth it back out, then crumple it again, then smooth it back out.
Then, I had him go outside and rub a bunch of dirt onto the paper to make it more yellow. It didn't work quite like I'd hoped however. Instead of yellowing, it got more brown and...well, dirty. Well, it was better than nothing.
Next, I grabbed a lighter, and burned the edges of the paper to give it that classic treasure map look. I hope I didn't give Little any ideas that he might try on his own later.
Before we finished up, Little suggested that we put the paper in the oven. He said that was how his sister yellowed a paper for this kind of a use once. That seemed like a pretty good idea, so we did. It worked well, although the oven rack left stripes of non-yellowed areas where the where the metal touched the paper.
Little grabbed a sharpie, drew his map to his treasure, and he was done creating his own pirate treasure map.
It turned out pretty good, but I think we learned some lessons on how to do it better next time. Use a cookie sheet rather than put it right on the oven rack most importantly. Who knows if we'll remember the lessons by the next time we do this, though?
Little led me on the treasure hunt, which turned out to be pretty short. Making that map turned out to be the proverbial long walk for a short trip. What did we find at the end? A box of tropical Mike & Ikes.
"They're gems," he said.
I've never before seen somebody stuff gems down their throat like Little did, though.
They've been sending those famous airplane aerial acrobats, the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels, around the country to do salutes to the frontline healthcare workers who are putting their own safety on the line to treat the people who have contracted coronavirus. In New York, they got both teams at once. They've been hit the hardest, so they deserved it.
Compared to New York, here in Houston we've barely been touched. We've had some cases, though, and the healthcare workers are still bravely caring for them, so they deserve a salute as well. I was excited to learn that they would be sending the Blue Angels out to do a flyover.
The event was supposed to start at 12:30, and they were going to fly over all the hospitals in town, including the one right in my own little suburb. I posted about my excitement on Facebook as we left for the event.
Notice the time stamp on that post. 12:09. That's going to be important. Normally, twenty minutes to get to the Lowe's is more than enough, but there were factors I hadn't considered.
We all got in the car, two cars actually, because I was going to have to leave straight to work when it ended, but my kids would be going back home where they were not going to school. We turned one way to head out, but found the line up to get through the first stop sign so backed up that I abandoned that direction and turned around to try another, possibly quicker way.
We drove down a residential street, but the world's slowest delivery van managed to get between my daughter's car and mine. He wasn't just obeying the speed limit, he was making sure to go at least five maybe even ten miles under it. It took us forever to get down that road and out onto one of the main thoroughfares. We were running behind, but we should still be able to make it.
We took a right up ahead, and were on the last road before arriving at our destination, but then we hit an unexpected slow down. Traffic was backed up and creeping along. I kept checking the clock every few seconds. It started at 12:30, but the flight plan had them starting way over in The Woodlands. It takes a good thirty minutes to get from The Woodlands to where I live. I saw this map of the flight plan:
How long would it take for the jets to make that first flight south over The Woodlands then the turn back north to where I live? I had no idea. I was hoping a little while, though, because the time on the clock kept ticking away, and the traffic was crawling. I was getting more and more agitated, and I gave up on making it to Lowe's. Any parking lot with a hole open to the sky was good enough.
I finally pulled off at a parking lot that we passed, and parked and looked to where the planes should be coming past. We sat there for a moment, Van Halen's "Dreams" playing from a bluetooth speaker that I brought with me for the occasion, when someone else in the parking lot came over and asked, "Did you guys see it?"
"Oh, you're kidding, it already happened?" I said.
It was 12:38 when we pulled in. I thought they couldn't possibly have passed quicker than eight minutes, but I was wrong. The guy told me it happened at 12:34. Thanks to the traffic, I had missed the Blue Angels by four minutes. I was devastated.
The guy asked for my phone number, so he could text me his video of the event. So, here's that:
It's not a bad video, but since he texted it, it got compressed down to a super low-res version that sucks hard.
Thanks to that guy, I at least got to see the event, but all it did was make me feel worse. I looked at it and thought, "That would have been so cool to see." My kids, who also missed it, looked at the video and said, "Oh, that would have been awesome." None of us got to know what it was like.
I know the Blue Angels do air shows all the time, so if I want to see them, I just have to wait until people are allowed to gather in groups larger than two again, and go to one. I may do that, but it won't be the same. This particular flyover meant something. The air shows are just pilots showing off what their jets can do for fans. This flyover was a way to unite our community as we persevere through a crisis. Something more meaningful than any air show performance the Blue Angels have ever done...and I missed it by four frigging minutes.
I was so devastated. I got in my car and drove to work, cursing and swearing the whole way. I put an angry song on my phone, and played it on repeat for a good eight or ten spins.
I eventually got tired of stewing in my juices, and put something else on that managed to get my mind off my failure, but then I arrived at work, and it was the only thing people were talking about. My boss asked me if I saw it the second I got in the door.
"Don't ask," was the best response I could give him. I couldn't talk about it. Most people would get to leave it at that, but I work in news, and the news of the day was the Blue Angels flyover, so I saw it over and over and over again throughout the day. I had to edit video of it. I had to watch the news packages on it. My nose got rubbed in my failure at least a hundred times throughout the day.
I would say, maybe next time. Maybe next time there's an earth-shattering event and the Blue Angels fly right over my neighborhood to help unite our country in one purpose I'll make it on time to see that one. But, of course, we all know there won't be a next time.
Okay, April is over. Here's my writing totals for the month:
I have been at this writing goal for a pretty long while now, since the end of October of 2019. I am officially beyond the halfway mark of the year. In fact, if you look on the April chart above, the 26th of April is shaded a different color. That was the exact halfway mark.
My goal is 300,000 words for the year, and the way I planned things, I should be able to reach that in ten months. I gave myself two months of leeway at the start to get into the habit, and I didn't get a lot of words written on those months, because I was still not used to writing every day, and kept forgetting to do so.
So, you would think, if I had two relatively weak months, then I shouldn't be passing the halfway point of my goal before the actual halfway point of the year, but that has not been the case. As I said a few posts ago, I hit the 150,000 mark on Sunday the 19th, a full week before the halfway day arrived.
Progress has been coming along pretty well. I'm really happy with how things are going. Here's my full year's worth of charts:
My only goal for April was to get more words than I did in March. I've managed to get more words every single month so far.
That's pretty awesome, and it makes me feel pretty confident in myself. Right now, a whole lot of things in my life are just a big dumpster fire, but the writing is steady, and I don't worry about it at all.
This month could have been really bad, because there was that point in the month where I had to switch from one project that I had finished to starting another project. That's always hard, because I feel that lack of preparation. But when I finished my last Christmas story, called "Crossing the Globe" I just moved into my novel idea of "The Gauntlet." I did a lot of preproduction for it last year, so I was ready to go.
I'm going to continue with my goal of expanding my total each month, so I'm hoping to beat 37668. Each month of improvement makes the order a little taller to beat it, so hopefully I can still manage. Maybe I can manage to turn the other things around, and put out the dumpster fire. We'll see how it all goes.
