Update: I finished centering and describing all our photos from Taiwan. Take a looksy.

Okay. It’s not much of a story, but I did try. The original idea was good, but where it went…I’m not sure I like where it went, but wherever it ended up (and I’m not even sure it ended anywhere near where it began), it’s a long and painful journey, sort of like a warped sewcrates.com entry (not that any of it is real in the sense that these are my thoughts—well some of them are, but they’re mostly bent or misshapen versions of my thoughts, which when I think about it, is what most of my fiction is). Without further ado or throat clearing or excuses, here it is.

wringinghair.com

My girl looks good today. The sad part is that she doesn’t always look good. You know how they say you always hurt the ones you love. It’s hogwash, a tautology. The thing is you can only hurt the ones you love. Trust me on this one. There are lots and lots of people that I hate and I’ve tried to hurt them all. But the only people I end up hurting are those that I do love, a small, select group who weaseled their way into my life. There are times where my girl doesn’t look so hot, times where I’m walking down the street with her arm wrapped around mine, and I’m thinking, boy, this girl of mine, she doesn’t make me feel special. I’ve gone out with girls where I’d walk into a restaurant and everybody would turn and stare at us. I know they weren’t looking at me. Hell, I can barely stand looking at me in the mirror. But my girl, when she’s on my arm, I know these same people in the restaurant are not saying, boy, that guy over there, he’s one lucky SOB, or, I’d do her in a second. I try to accept her for what she is, but it’s hard, you know. I have to admit that I like that feeling, that, what the fuck is that guy doing with this beautiful creature, he doesn’t deserve her; it’s like his dick (my dick) must be huge or something, that’s what they’re saying. But she looks good today and maybe if those same people saw her, they’d say things like that. It’s hard to tell what people are going to say. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m going to say from one minute to the next. My girl looks good today, and the thing is, she won’t talk to me. Isn’t that how it always works: you want what you can’t have. Fate is a fucking bitch, if you ask me.

I’m a writer of sorts. I’ve been at it for about six months and I’m getting popular. I write on this blog thing, I’m sure if you read blogs, you would have seen mine. I named it wringinghair.com. With a name like that, you’d figure I would have long hair, but I don’t. I’m running out of hair, to tell you the truth. I usually do that: tell people the truth. That’s why I think people read this thing, these entries. I mean, hell, you’re reading this one right now, and I’m assuming you’re a person. You could be one of those crawly search bots recording all these words for future people to search them out, but even if you were, you wouldn’t really be reading this in the sense that you and I read this. You’d be recording these words and the meaning would be lost on you.

I started this on a whim. I write long correspondences with people. It’s what I’ve always done starting in college. I’ll sit down and start writing and stuff will come out, and some of it’s cute or funny, but most of it is just run-of-the-mill junk. Then I’d get a response and I’d pick apart the response, and respond to all the points that the other person made. The problem with doing that is the length. After a few responses and counter-responses, you start getting correspondences that take a long time to write. Eventually I’d get bored and wouldn’t respond for a while and then start anew, you know, with brand new words and points that would evolve again through this process. So, one of my friends who I’ve been corresponding with for years, a real stand-up guy, he wrote me a few months ago and told me about these blogs. He said I was wasting my words on such a small audience; that I should be broadcasting them to the world.

My girl didn’t at first take to the idea. She was afraid I’d share facts about her. That wasn’t my intention, at least initially. At first, I didn’t care one way or the other about doing the blog. It was an interesting idea, but I didn’t see the point. Then I started looking into it and reading other blogs, and I realized all these “writers” were hacks. Here I was a guy who had been practicing this type of writing his entire life, developing clever writing styles and abilities and all sorts of insights and brilliance, and I wasn’t sharing them or gaining critical acceptance. I figured that if there were an audience for the drivel that was out there, surely there’d be an audience for more refined drivel. I had it out with my girl, I said, listen, I’m going to do this whether you want me or not, and I’m going to protect you, you know. I have this way of looking at my girl when I really want to convince her of something. It’s not the classic puppy-dog eyes, since that only works a few times and they begin to suspect manipulation. It’s more the, I know you think I’m manipulating you but you should know better, I mean, how long have we been going out, three years now, and if you don’t know me better than that, that I’m only looking out for my own good when taking into account your good, then why are we still together, type of look. I’m not sure if your significant other has a look like that, but if they don’t, you should develop one. It’s the type of look that only one person can have in a relationship, and when used effectively, it’s a mean one, a trump card. So, I’m giving her this look, and she caves, we’re talking avalanche. She starts talking about how she’s going to help me in the process, how we’ll do it together. She even says she’ll set it up, find me the fonts and the pictures that’ll make it cool looking. I’m all for it. All I wanted to do was write the thing, I didn’t want to worry about how it looked. I never really was one for looks. I’m about the content not the dressing, but I figured it’d make her happy, it’d make her feel part of the team. That’s how I decided on the name. When she’s deep in thought, my girl I’m talking about, she sometimes wrings her hair, as if she’s trying to squeeze water from it, but it’s not wet or anything. Sometimes she takes large chunks of her hair and wrings it, other times it’s just a few hairs, but I catch her doing it all the time. So, I gave her free rein to do what she thought best for the looks of the site, and I’d do what I thought best for the content of the site. I like that saying, free rein. It’s like she’s a horse that I bridled or something.

I wrote and people responded almost immediately. It’s not like papers or magazines, where you have to advertise and distribute. It’s more of a viral thing. When one person sees your blog, they tell their friend who starts looking at it, who tells their friend, and before you know it, you’re paying lots of money for additional bandwidth so this guy in India can read what you wrote on the toilet that morning. But my thoughts are that when they give you a box this big, you should shout from it as loud as possible, and I’m shouting. If you’ve ever had a box—and I’m not saying you deserve one or you’d even know what to do with one, all I’m saying is that if you had such a big box—you’d understand what I was talking about.

That’s not what this is about, though. The above is background. That’s what good writers do, they provide context before they dive right into what they really want to say. Had I jumped right in, you might have been confused, and that’s what I’m here for: to unconfuse you, tell you easily digestible things. If you have to work too hard, you’d quit, and I don’t want that. I want you to read and understand what it is I have to say. I’m not saying you have to agree with me or take on my views of the world or, in the best case, be my minion just because you read these words. I mean, it’d be a nice bonus and everything, and I’ve always thought about what I’d do with a couple hundred followers, but it’s not required of anyone. This isn’t a church, it’s just the inside of my brain. Take that for what it’s worth.

Writing for wringinghair.com isn’t hard for me. It’s something that I do without thinking, like tying my shoes or fucking—I get down and dirty and do it, and worry about what I’m doing when I’m finished. But even when I’m doing it, I need context, a hook. I’m talking about writing now, but even if I went back to my other example, I would need someone or something to do it with, or at least a fantasy to think about or even better, to look at. It’s tough to do it without a focal point, or at least, I can’t do it without a focal point. It’s the same when I write. I need something to write about. With the correspondences, it was easy. I’d relay my life and then respond to the questions or comments of the other person. It’d be like a dialogue, where we’d feed off the other’s points. When I write a wringinghair.com entry, I write something every day to develop the audience. This is not something I do willy-nilly once or twice a month and expect people to have the patience to keep checking and hope for an update because they won’t (ever again surf to wringinghair.com, that is). And my life, while moderately interesting, is not interesting in a day-to-day sense. There are whole weeks where nothing happens, where the proverbial tumbleweed drifts by.

At times, it’s hard for me to figure out what to write about. Sure, I could link to other blog sites, or news sites, or miscellaneous pages, but everyone does that, and it becomes incestuous. How interesting is a hundred peoples’ thoughts on the same site, or worse, their thoughts on sites that have linked to that site, or, even worse, their thoughts on sites that have linked to sites that have linked to that site. You see where I’m going with that? Ordinary bloggers end up patting each other on the back and regurgitating the same shit over and over, and nobody reads them. The one thing I’m not is ordinary. If you haven’t figured that out, then I’m not doing a very good job conveying what I’m trying to convey. I’m a clever connoisseur, and I don’t use clever as an adjective there, it’s a noun. I seek out what is clever and present it to you, my audience. Cleverness is different from funny, although, I guess they both can provide laughs.

Now we come to the thing. This is where the argument happened and what all the exposition was for. The thing is, I have a limited reservoir of clever thoughts. Some writers talk about their never-ending well of ideas, as if every time they write or think up new things, there’s bound to be other things waiting in the wings, waiting to come out and surprise their readers and the writer herself (I use herself instead of himself because I’m respectful that way. My girl doesn’t see it, but I try to reach out to everyone, including the weaker sex, and show them that I feel their pain and want to improve their lot in life). I savor my clever moments and to do so, I have to save them and use them sparingly. I don’t have a file or anything, but when I have one, I jot it down before it escapes. I begin writing the entry (or part of it) based on the clever idea, throwing it like a seed (the clever idea) into the wind (my writing) and watching the plant grow (the blog entry) where the seed (the clever idea again) hits the fertile ground (my computer screen and/or wringinghair.com). This is where my girl comes back into the story, and why I brought her up in the first place. As I hinted at before, I’m not a terribly attractive individual. I know my limitations, but I also know the weaker sex, and I know for them it’s not about physical beauty. Their genes are looking for something else, sometimes a provider, others a sadist or father figure, and still others a confident wooer. Whatever they’re looking for, I know how to provide it. I use my cleverness to spark their interest and then give them what they’re looking for. This was how I got my girl. She’s not the type I normally go out with. To be honest, she’s falls on the plain side of the spectrum, not scary looking, but ordinary, a ring finger in a crowd of fingers and thumbs, if you will. What drew me to her was her confidence and humor. She’s not clever in the sense that I’m clever, but her sense of humor is rye and ironic, and her deep-veined pessimism sees the worst and funniest aspects of every situation. It’s like living with a real-life Elaine from Seinfeld, always ready with a lot of energy and a funny remark about the everyday. What I discovered, however, was that when I shared my cleverness before I wrote it into the entry, it grew stale. The writing wasn’t crisp, wasn’t as interesting. It was as if, to continue my earlier analogy, the seed (the clever idea) grew into a plant (the blog entry) and I ripped the plant out of the ground and threw the plant into the air. What I would end up with was a shriveled plant (the ruined blog entry). So, what I started to do was not share my clever remarks. Instead, when one hit me, I’d run to my computer and pound it out. Put it all down before it was too late and I lost it or thought about it too much and shriveled it (the plant or blog entry).

At first, writing a few notes down about the clever idea was good enough, as long as I didn’t share the idea or think too much about it. But that only lasted a bit. I found that the longer the idea aged, the worse it got. I started running to the computer every time a clever idea struck me. At first, my girl was cool with that. She liked my hobby, liked peeking into my brain, and she loved that she could help participate in it. She still worked on the site, setting it up, changing the graphics, etc.—she’s a techy, much more than me, and she’s good at things like that. The thing is, she wanted me to talk to her about the clever ideas. She started complaining that we didn’t have real conversations anymore, that anytime we approached an interesting topic, I would run off to my little room and type away. To her credit, she’s sort of right. Things came to a head yesterday when we were having dinner with her parents (I’ve talked about her parents before, and I’ll say it again. If ever there were too more annoying, ugly, patronizing, vindictive, unsavory, smelly, or downright horrible individuals, I haven’t met them yet. When I talked above about hurting those that I hate, these two are on the top of my list). Her mother likes to take us out to fancy restaurants to rub in my face that I do not supply my girl with the best of things, that I’m cheap and poor, depending on what she wants to ride me on that particular day. We were eating when it hit me, my clever idea for the day’s entry. I excused myself and ran out the door, jumped in a cab, and got home just as the clever idea was going to become too rancid to use. I spent the next two hours refining the idea in words and what came out was—and I recommend you thumb back to it—my most brilliant creation. If there’s one entry that defined who I was or ever wanted to be, this one was it. When my girl got home, she saw things a different way. We had a huge argument and she stormed out, taking my precious computer with her, well, I guess it’s her computer, but this was the same computer that I wrote my entries on, so it had, over the course of many months, became more mine than hers, if you think of it in that way.

So, there you have it. She left me writing this entry in an internet café, where I have to spend five dollars an hour to share my thoughts with you, my audience. I know many of you will write comments about this incident, and I wanted to supply my girl’s e-mail so you can direct your comments to her personally. I figure if the inspiration of wringinghair.com heard from you, the washed and highly educated masses, then she’d come crawling back. E-mail her at jackie66830, and tell her I sent you.

***

A quick note as I started writing the story: Please, don’t start another story, paragraph, or sentence with a character sitting or staring. Please!

The original idea, which struck me last night, was to write a story about a writer (and then blogger when I gave it a bit more though) who stopped talking to people because he didn’t want to waste his clever ideas or thoughts; he wanted to save them all for his blog. Everything else in it is filler (DFW-influenced filler, to be more particular). But as I hinted at yesterday, I’m going to get back into writing vignettes or story pieces every day. What I’ve discovered is I don’t do well writing about writing. The only way I can tell a story is to write the story, and then rewrite it until I’m happy. To discuss it in writing (or meta-write, as Chuck penned) is pointless. Hearing the critiques of others is useful for the rewrite, but writing about writing or even detailed outlining is pointless. I’m still up in the air about character sketches, since they did help my FBT story, but we’ll see. What I want to do is move more of my entries into the Story category and less in the Writing category. You can think of the Writing category as the Meta-Writing category, and the Story category as the Real writing category, just for future reference.

When I read my old vignettes yesterday, I also discovered that the more I wrote stories, the better the stories became. The first few stories were decent, but it wasn’t until the end, the Chairs and The Clockman that I found my stride. I expect the same to happen this week, as I write try to find an interesting voice and a few nuggets that make up interesting stories. The real trick, I think, will be when I tackle stories that require more than one sitting to write. I seem to start strong, get lost the in the middle, and then finish strong. If I can find that comfortable middle then…this is all filler or meta-writing. It’s hard to stop once I get going on it.

What I said about DFW’s Oblivion yesterday, I take it back. I take it all back. He is a genius, a misunderstood genius, but a genius nonetheless. Some of his early stories in the collection were hard to get into (I found myself thumbing through the pages trying to figure out how many pages were left in the story—one critic said his first 60-page story read like a 100-page story, and I couldn’t agree more), but once I understood where he was going or what he was trying to say, they were great, some better than others, but all great writing and great stories, even if some of them didn’t finish by tying up all the loose ends. The DFW story I finished reading last night that produced this epiphany was written by a man who committed suicide—DFW embraced the dilemma of writing a first-person story by a dead person after his death—and what he does at the ending is meta-fiction at its best (which is much better and more interesting than meta-writing, which I do way too much of). So, to recap, DFW is still a god, not the god, but definitely a god, perhaps one of the lesser ones (yes, I quote that line from the movie “Groundhog’s Day” way often; I know). The Oblivion reviews say that his last story is the best one, so I’ll let you know how it is after I finish it.

I was optimistic about doing more writing today. I even left work early because, well, it’s the week between New Years and Christmas and nobody is there. I drove home, bought groceries, and was even humming as I pulled through my driveway (I’m exaggerating about the humming, I almost never hum—I’m exaggerating about the almost never part of humming, I do sometimes hum, but I don’t like to admit it). Then I took the turn behind my house too wide and my car is now stuck in three inches of soft soil and gravel, spinning its wheels foolishly—or at least it was as I dug myself deeper and deeper into the aforementioned soil and gravel. I’m now sitting on my couch so I assume my wheels are no longer spinning and digging the car deeper into the ground, if that, at this point, is possible. After calling my technical experts (thanks Eran!), I poured myself a glass of wine, only to find out that the wine bottle I opened a week ago was now vinegary. This has not turned out to be my night. I had thoughts of a roaring fire and a vegetable-laden dinner followed by hours of pounding on the keyboard. Now, I’ll be lucky if I can pound a few minutes before succumbing to my evil mood. Maybe I’ll use that to finish the story: evil mood. Now I’m humming. (Edit: I obviously found a little, okay, a lot, more energy to write after finishing this paragraph.)

Oh, if you can’t tell, I drank my first mocha in over a week, which is where all this is coming from. Tea is good and everything, but when it comes to real caffeination powers, there’s nothing like the bucks of stars. If only I could bottle that energy—oh, wait.