The Sleeping Sun

I'VE BEEN READING this book that was on a lot of year’s best lists. Wait, actually it was on one list, but other people linked to it on twitter several times and I keep clicking on the same link and was surprised to keep seeing the same book on all these lists, which were the same list.

I figured it out, eventually, but it made for a hyper-awareness of this particular book.

I’m still in the middle of it, and will eventually review it on Goodreads, but there was a short, two or three paragraph section that caught my eye.

In it, in a section that mentions synesthesia, it talks about some neurologists believe a developing baby brain, as it become a toddler, and eventually a child, might sense the world more like someone with synesthesia does.

Interesting, but that lead to a digression about a child animising the objects around them. And how that too is part of the development of understanding the world.

On new year’s, we’d been babysitting my nephews, and I decided to see if my youngest might give me some anecdotal evidence that there is any truth to this. The book suggested asking a young child about what happens to the sun at night. So I asked.

“What happens to the sun at night time?” I asked.

My youngest nephew (herefore to be called, Younger) said, very matter of factly, “The sun gets sleepy, and he has to rest. So he lays down and sleeps until morning.”

My older nephew (I shall dub him, Elder), who is in school, was aghast, he immediately gave a very long, but essentially correct, explanation about the solar system and earth’s rotation while orbiting the sun.

Younger went quiet for at least two seconds after Elder’s explanation before he quite confidently said, “That makes absolutely no sense.”

Kids. They’re pretty awesome.

A QUICK SET OF GOALS for 2014. They’re pretty simple.

1)      Write 500 words of fiction per day. That would add up to 175,000 words in a year. That's a pretty impressive number for a pretty small amount of work on a daily basis. I managed to get 1k out today during lunch. If I don't get it done, no big deal. It's the journey, not the destination. 

2)      Revise and Edit. Tons of stuff to do really. Tons.

3)     In order to help with my nuts and bolts of plotting, I’m thinking of crafting a super complicated time-travel story. Because the airtight time travel story is really the holy grail of plotting, I think. They don’t get done often.

That’s about it for me. Happy 2014, folks.

Those Crazy Days of Elementary School

I had a short post over at Alex’s blog today where I firmly established I’m not crazy. Whew. Glad that matter is settled. Please go read if you haven’t already. I’m sure you’ll find my logic irrefutable.

I had intended to continue my thought over here, but after careful consideration, I’ve realized I have nothing else to say on the subject.  Instead, I’ll entertain you with a story from my childhood.

I moved a lot as a kid, I didn’t attend the same school for two years in a row until I was in 7^th grade. During one memorable stint – 5^th grade – I lived on a farm. That isn’t to say that I ever spent any time farming, just that I lived there. To be specific, we rented a plot of land, plopped a trailer down on it, and lived.

My mother happened to be the proud owner of one ’67 Chevy Impala. It was big, made out of solid steel and had a steering wheel that belonged on a battleship. Estimated weight, 3000 pounds.

My sister, a high school student, borrowed the car from her. A lot. During the afternoons when school was over my Mom would be at work and the car would be there, just waiting for someone to go take it. So, I decided to go for a spin. We were, after all, country people now, I’d better learn to fit in.

Who could resist? No one. It's impossible

I grabbed the keys, a telephone book, and decided to go for a ride.

Oh, the telephone book? I had to sit on it in order to see over the steering wheel.

It seemed so easy at first, just pull out onto the road and stay on my side of the yellow line (if the road had one) and don’t drive off of the road. Everything else would work itself out. It didn’t take me long to determine that being the only kid in the 5^th grade that could drive pretty much made me the coolest kid in school, so I had to show off.

I went to visit friends, waved at the suckers that still had to use their bicycles to get around, and generally got lost of oohs and ahhhs from pretty much everyone. Kids at school were coming up to me and shaking their heads in awe. That’s the kid that drives.

The thing is though, it was scary as crap. I started going for joyrides when I had a chance for a while afterwards – but in the back of my mind, I knew I was riding a bull. It's one of those things that you experience when you're young. You know it's oh so wrong, yet, it's impossible to resist.

It wasn't like I starting doing this all the time, but I didn't just do it the one time, I did it and survived. The cool factor made me do it again, and again. So, after enough trips to start feeling pretty confident in my skills, I was driving in a neighborhood and a car pulls out opposite me, a group of my friends jump out from behind the car, all on their bicycles, and into my path. I was about to run them over.

Like anyone in a tense situation, my perception of time slowed down. I calmly decided that I couldn’t possibly avoid them by hitting the brake of the car. So instead I cut the wheel in the opposite direction and mashed the accelerator to the floor.

What was in the opposite direction? Oh, nothing much, a house for sure. Oh yes, one more thing. A tree. Approximate weight of tree… much less than 3000 pounds.

I jumped the curb and slung mud all over the place. I kept my foot planted to the floorboard though. That tree, I still remember that tree. I recall hitting it - and running the damn thing down.

It was still young, just small and soft enough that it would give when hit by all that kinetic energy. It gave. I killed a tree.

I, and the others that were in the car with me, looked around. I’ll tell you, it was almost worth it to see the look on those kids faces, the ones that were on their bicycles. They were stuck in open mouthed awe at the wanton destruction.  At my destruction.

It was only a moment, then it was gone. We got out of there as fast as we could, got home, acted like nothing happened and hoped that the police wouldn’t show up later. Never could figure out why no one ever did. There were tons of witnesses. One tore up yard, one dead tree, and a whole lot of people that knew who I was.

I learned my lesson though, learned it well. Kids should never, ever, be allowed, under any circumstances, to play in the street. Another kid might run them down with his car.


Happy Wednesday people.

Post 102 About Me Getting Old

"Hey Dad, can you take us somewhere so we can Parkour?"

My son, he wants to do Parkour now. Damn. It was just a few short months ago when he was banned from video games, partially because I wanted him to get off his butt and start being active. Now he wants to Parkour, I'd rather he go play Madden.

I don't know at what point I became an old man, after all, I still have a hard time thinking of myself as an adult. In my head I have stayed perpetually 17.  But watching my kids growing up has certainly made me feel old. There are a few teenagers in the house now. If they don't have anything to do they'll sleep until 4 in the afternoon - wake up, go to the kitchen, complain that there isn't anything to eat, dirty seven dishes without eating and then ask for money - so they can buy food. That's just what kids do.

"When I was your age," I will say, "I got to go to Shoney's every few months - If I was lucky." That's mostly true. It was generally up to me to find something in the house and make do. How else would I be so familiar with powdered milk and potted meat? I learned quite by accident several things that definitely do not go together in the kitchen - example, you can't use cinnamon as a substitute for chili powder. Trust me.

Somehow though, my awesome stories of my youth fall on deaf ears. To them I'm just an ATM that rambles a lot before I fork over the cash. Where did it all go so wrong?

It seems like it was only yesterday that I would hold my son on my knee and he would ask me endless questions about what my life was like when I was his age. I would entertain him with stories of getting lost in the woods, of falling out of moving vehicles (no one wore seat belts when I was a kid), getting attacked by a wild turkey, or a domesticated raccoon. He wanted every detail and I was happy to oblige. 

He's at a point now that I think he'd like to hear my stories about being arrested in a foreign country, drinking Wild Turkey, falling out of moving vehicles, cutting school to play with handguns, and dating strippers. 

But again, he'd rather not hear about it. I guess it's all fine really. It's part of getting older. Which brings me back to what always is in my thoughts: Getting old. I'm not sure when I became an old man, but I did. My bones ache, I'm keenly interested in my bowel movements and I'm always preoccupied with how my lawn is doing. I feel like I've experienced all the adventure I ever will, the rest of my life will be me retelling the same stories over and over. 

I think it's that last part that gets me, I have no desire to actually do anything else, but a burning desire to have done much more. It makes me wish I could just make stuff up.

You know that movie First Blood? The Sly Stallone movie from the early 80's? Totally based on a weekend I had in Gatlinburg. That seems easy enough. Just make it up and try to sell it. How else can I get his attention?

I guess I sort of lie already, I tell the kids that I was a straight A student at their age (true - if you look at my end of year report card horizontally - I got A's in P.E. every grading period). I may have mentioned I could dunk a basketball (also true - if the goal was lowered down to eight feet...and I had something to jump off of... and land on... and the basketball was replaced by a tennis ball). Still, those are the sorts of lies every parent tells. I think it's expected. 

But back to my son's Parkour wish,  I don't know if you know what that is, but here is brief youtube video to give you an idea:

It only take a few seconds of watching to see why I'm horrified. So my kid wants me to drop him off so he can try to backflip off of buildings and onto moving vehicles.

This is the same kid that I had to rush to the emergency room because he had some Wile E. Coyote type of incident in his bedroom and ended up crashing through his bedroom window. He wasn't trying to do something stupid. He was just trying to walk from his bed to his desk.

I'm not so sure he's cut out for Parkour.

After his incident we were at the emergency room  and it was with mangled and bloody limbs that he begged for a cell phone. I, as any concerned parent would, watched in horror as he struggled to dial, he persevered though, and managed to call almost every person he ever met to tell them how awesome of an accident he had and that he was totally getting stitches in the emergency room.

And like a bolt of lightening it dawned on me - as I write this I mean, not last year at the emergency room - He is tired of my stories not because they are boring, but because he wants to start telling his own. 

I'll be damned, that lifetime of me telling him all this crazy crap that I did when I was a kid/teenager is coming back to haunt me. He is taking my half-truths and slightly exaggerated exploits of my youth and is trying to one-up me. Geez. I might be in serious trouble.