Word Addiction: A Brief History of My One True Love

Even if she wasn’t a huge reader herself, my mother knew the importance of making me fall in love with books. At an early age I was given a handful of little plastic-bound tomes to sift through so that I might learn the building blocks of what would eventually become my first real addiction. Had the doctors allowed such a thing, she might have brought some into the delivery room and put them in my tiny, placenta-covered hands to jumpstart the process. But, as was her fashion, she stuck to the rules and waited until we got home.

By the time I was in kindergarten, I knew the alphabet, and thus was bored to death as my teacher, Mrs. Young, showed videotapes of little cartoon consonants and vowels acting as though they were people. Instead of watching to figure out how a group of sans-serif individuals could befriend one another to make simple words, I resorted to looking out windows and staring at walls, wishing that I were at home.

That next year, during a parent-teacher conference, my teacher refused to believe that I could read a storybook deemed beyond what a first-grader was able to do. My parents disagreed, and so in a battle of wills, it was agreed upon that I would be forced to read the book in class. Aloud. In front of everyone. All in all, the book was pretty easy. It had to do with a star or a baby lion or something along those lines. Nothing beyond Charlotte’s Web or anything by Judith Viorst or even a James Patterson novel, for that matter. Still, I got up in front of my class and got about five pages in, a little more than halfway through the book, when my teacher told me that that was enough. “That’s all we have time for today,” she said, sending me back to my seat.

Throughout the rest of my grade school years I took an insane pleasure from copying down words and learning to spell, and on our visits to the school library my friends would find me salivating like a dog waiting on the promise of a treat. Every few months when my teachers would hand out the leaflets for a new Scholastic Book Fair, I would treasure it, worrying the edges with my fingers and taking in each title’s little synopsis with what amounted, back then, to ecstasy.

It wasn’t until middle school that I began to learn the joys of writing myself. Before then, my knowledge of composition had been limited to basic school reports, which were cookie-cut and had all the flexibility of a back brace. My first attempts at writing for fun were transcriptions of video games I’d played, scribbled in pencil in my school notebooks. Then came fantasies about spaceships from television shows like Star Trek scouring the galaxy for adventure. No one saw these. Not even my mother, who tried peering over my shoulder to see what I was up to, sitting at my desk, my back to my bedroom door, hunched over with one hand hidden and working furiously at something. Looking back, I suppose the concern she displayed might have been at the mistaken notion that I, at twelve years old, had prematurely discovered the fun that is masturbation.

From my space-bound adventures, I transitioned into more humorous fare. Namely, a collection of stories that concerned my friend and classmate Tiffany, who would make me laugh with her made-up recollections about living in a Mexican hut with a feline named HeyCat. The stories came out in a frenzy of excitement that was ushered in when I showed the first one to my language arts teacher, Mrs. Althoff, who would sit at her desk and read them, laughing occasionally against the hush of the classroom. The sound of her laughing was like a drug, and so I set out like a junkie looking for my fix.

At this time, books too became more adventurous, as I reached beyond the children’s fare of Judy Blume and Louis Sachar and into the deeper waters of Lowis Lowry and Rodman Philbrick, both of whom demonstrated a fascinating ability to achieve in me an emotional reaction. I read my first Stephen King novel my last year of eighth grade.

Throughout the rest of middle school and into high school, writing became more than just a hobby. I felt as though I had been called to write, and I took the mantle of doing so with all the seriousness and gravitas capable of a slightly overweight teenage boy into writing stories about talking Mexican cats and intergalactic spaceships. Stories stretched and reached for things which they had never attempted before. Characters grew larger as explosions diminished; humor took a backseat to my crazy, wild-eyed attempts at lassoing the same emotional power that I could see authors wielding in their works.

College brought on courses in creative writing, which introduced me to people who had the same desires as me. It felt refreshing to be in a room full of people who I imagined got the same thrill out of crating a well-worded sentence as me, even if in reality few of them actually enjoyed writing as much as they enjoyed having one less elective course to add to next semester’s schedule.

When I came into a class called Practical Criticism — a course dedicated to the routine dissection of stories, as if they were frogs — I first met Jason Wendleton, the coauthor of this blog. By the end of the semester we had struck up a friendship, one that I’m 98.6 percent certain remains to this day. Part of the draw was the mutual attraction to the limitless possibilities of writing. The magic of creation. The power of good prose. And, of course, our strong aversion to looking for real jobs.

After college was finished for Jason and myself — he with his genuine UM-St. Louis English degree and me with my still-in-progress dual major in Laziness and Procrastination — we started talking about our mutual desire to start putting our works out into the world. Seeing as neither of us had any major publications aside from some of Jason’s columns for The Current, the college newspaper, and a short story I’m managed to weasel into the UM-St. Louis LitMag, we decided to start a blog: this very one.

It is hard to believe how quickly time can pass. As most people do, I think the process gets quicker each year. It was approximately 365 days ago that Jason and I founded this little blog, this scattershot collection of random trinkets and pieces of work that remind us (or remind me, anyway) of why it is that writing draws us in like it does. It takes me beyond the ordinary, and it fills in the little gaps in life with things that I would never hope to accomplish. Through writing, both my own and others’, I have seen this world and more, lived years in other people’s lives.

My crazes for caffeine, candy, and fast food have all come and gone with relative ease, but the one thing that always draws me back, even when I try my hardest to ignore it, is the written word. When I sit down to write, I am reminded of the sheer power of imagination, and the everyday magic of creation. That, and it gives me the hope that, one day, I won’t have to have a real job.

Happy birthday, Scattershot.

(There's No Such Thing As) The Color Purple

Unless you know what they look like, colors are impossible to describe. A blind person cannot be told—with any degree of accuracy—what the color green looks like. Color is one of those immaterial, “all in our heads” kind of thing. Light strikes an object and bounces off. This light hits our eye and our brain takes this light and interprets color—in a way I so complicated that I may as well call it “magic.” The surfaces of objects determine their color. Simply: whatever color an object is—that’s the wavelength of light the object absorbs the most of, the rest of the colors trapped inside a beam of light is “scattered.” If a surface scatters all wavelengths we see it as white, likewise, if all the wavelengths are absorbed we see black.

There are some people who are blind and see nothing and then there the “color blind.” These people have trouble seeing some colors because of a genetic defect in their eyes. All of this is remarkable and hard to grasp at the same time—in reality an object’s color has more to do with the light that is shining on it AND the person viewing it. For some reason this always reminds me of the classic “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it” question. I realize that all of this is very Zen, and probably bores most people to tears so I’ll get on with it.
Purple.

The word “purple” is a very strange word to me. Besides the numerous connotations to the color (royalty, homosexuality, Easter), there are a number of ideas…concepts or feelings that purple instantly brings to mind. Swollen, vulgar, unlikely, comical, and unhealthy. I think about flowers, of course, and I think about a bruise. Then there’s Barney the Dinosaur and Grimace the…whatever the hell he is over in McDonald’s. Of course, no matter how old I get, I’ll never forget my crazy 4th grade Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername.

In my experience, 99% of all Art Teachers are insane. I’m not talking a “bit-barmy-he-enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors”…I’m talking “fucking-nuts-he enjoys-opening-umbrellas-indoors…umbrellas-made-of human-flesh.” My cousin’s wife is an Art Teacher in Kansas, and while she’s a nice, normal sort, I assure you she is the exception to the rule. Art Teachers seem to be living in another world. One where clay speaks (if you know how to listen) and colored pencils should all have names—real names, like Larry or Steve.

After spending five hours mindlessly toiling on worksheets, my 4th grade class would gather our supplies and head to the basement of our school to the “art room.” This room consisted of several long wooden tables, and a few thousand dollars work of Prang watercolors. Oh, and there were drying racks—whole endless rows of drying racks.

Our Art Teacher, Miss Whatshername, would cackle as we entered her domain, like a witch. She usually wore something “Earthy” (think neutral browns, and material made of reeds and burlap sacks). Miss Whatshername had long, grayish hair that was freakishly straight and always wrapped in a do-rag. With her long, bony fingers she’d point us to our seats as we filed into the room.

Miss Whatshername had many peculiarities, but the most startling one was her abject hatred for Purple. This became apparent during our very first meeting when my class sat down to talk about colors. We learned that there are three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. These colors, when mixed in various ways, make all the other colors of the rainbow.

“What are all the colors?” Miss Whatshername asked us from her perch near the chalkboard.

“Orange,” someone said.

“Good!” Miss Whatshername said. “Orange is red and yellow mixed together!”

“Green!” another one of my classmates shouted.

“Ah yes, Green!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “Green is yellow and blue mixed together!”

“Purple.”

There was an icy silence as the smile faded from Miss Whatshername’s lips. She stood up slowly, like a dazed car-crash victim.

“What? What was that?”

No one said a word. You could hear a…crayon drop.

Miss Whatshername shuffled over to the chalkboard and picked up a hunk of white, furiously she began to scribble on the dusty white surface. I can still hear the shrill squeak of her chalk as she wrote. I can close my eyes and still see her flabby, middle-aged arm wobble as she angrily wrote one word, then another.

The two words were PURPLE and VIOLET.

“This,” Miss Whatshername said pointing at the word VIOLET. “Is a color, whereas this word…Purple…this is not a color.”

She looked at both the world Purple on the blackboard and us with a look of disgust. We were dirty and unrefined, and so was Purple. We began to murmur amongst ourselves, the venom in Miss Whatshername’s voice had both frightened and excited us. Was this woman serious? We’d been calling it Purple for years and no one had ever said a word about it not being a color.

And anyway, wasn't Violet a flower?

Someone got the idea to check the Crayon box—the good people at Crayola had our backs: the paper wrapper said “Purple.” When this fact was pointed out to Miss Whatshername, she became even more agitated.

“There is no such color as Purple and in my class, no one will use that term!” she shouted above the giggling din.

Was this woman insane?

“Purple…”

“No!” Miss Whatshername exclaimed. “No Purple!”

This was the first time I ever truly disagreed with a teacher. This instance was the first time a person in authority seemed completely stupid. It wasn’t just that I disagreed with what she was saying (she was correct in a way, “Purple” is a general, Old-English term…whereas “Violet” is the correct term for the color achieved by mixing red with blue), it was the manner in which she carried herself as she said it. What she was saying blew our little 4th grade minds. We’d been taught by both our parents and other teachers to call Violet “Purple.” The terms are essentially interchangeable in the everyday (read: non-art class) world.

This woman, this Miss Whatshername, was just being an intellectual snob.

Of course I didn’t know this at the time, but that’s what she was. Miss Whatshername was too good for the common “Purple.” Instead, the only word she’d “hear” in her class was Violet. Over the course of the year few of us would test her (those brave souls). They’d ask her for a Purple colored pencil, to see if she’d unthinkingly hand them a “Violet” one…thus establishing that the two were, in fact, one and the same. Or they’d ask her if they’d used too much Purple paint in their surrealistic lunchroom painting.

But Miss Whatshername never fell for it. She never took the bait; instead she’s just stare at them dumbly. Most of the time the question was asked twice, then it would be either abandoned or amended (“Violet” instead of “Purple”).

What scares me more than almost anything are people like Miss Whatshername. They’re infinitely more dangerous than people might think. Trapped alone with our children, they take impressionable minds and try to mold them, to bend them into their own specific worldview. Not by reason or explanation, but by the imposition of their dominance and authority.

There is no more reality to the word “Violet” than there is to the word “Purple.” Colors, after all, are really abstract concepts. They’re so abstract that one can’t adequately describe them to a blind person. The colors as we see them might not even exist were we not there to see them. That is how terribly tenuous these words (all words) are. My classmates and I weren’t saying “Apple” for “Rhinoceros,” we were using a less specific word to describe red and blue mixed together. One that was taught and accepted by most of the world—our teacher’s reaction was insane. Teachers should teach, not merely impose their knowledge upon their students.

There is no Purple. There is no Violet.

Geography

The class was supposed to be a “blow-off,” the kind you barely attend but still get an “A” because the material is so basic. Of course I got more than I bargained for. That’s pretty much the theme running through my life.

The class was taught by a middle-aged professor, I wish I could remember his name but frankly, he wasn’t a tenured instructor and his name wasn’t even printed on my schedule. He was what’s known as a “neo-hippy.” Unlike most Geography teachers, he’d actually been all over the world and was full of interesting anecdotes about the various places we studied that semester.

Of course, this was Community (aka “Junior”) College so somebody had to ask the question that was on all of our minds.

“Why are you in a wheelchair?”

I remember cringing and staring down at my desktop. I’ve only been to a few Community Colleges, but they seemed to be filled with the absolute dumbest people on the planet. The people just smart enough to maybe attend college—but dumb enough to not realize that they had a choice in the matter. Most of them acted like they were still in High School, which is why I wasn’t too surprised when someone blurted such a sensitive question.

I mean, what did it matter why the dude was in a chair? It’s not like it had ANY BEARING at ALL on our class. But ask they did, on the very first day of class. Thinking back on it, I guess he brought it upon himself when he finished going over the syllabus and asked the class if anyone had any questions.

I expected him to comment on how utterly rude the question was, but he didn’t. Like all people with a major physical difference he’d no doubt developed pretty thick skin about his condition. So, after we’d discussed the syllabus and the textbook we’d be using—our teacher told us the story of how he became a paraplegic.

Apparently he went swimming at a lake and dove head-first into water that was a bit too shallow. He broke his neck and severed his spine. I can still see his eyes shinning as he told us the story. Here I was at my first day of class and I was watching a (disabled) person I didn’t even know fight back tears.

This children, is the very definition of awkward.

Now, if I suddenly became disabled, I’d be one unhappy person. But this guy, my Geography teacher, wasn’t like that at all. He was very upbeat, almost to the point of nausea. A product of the 1960’s counter-culture, this guy had a philosophy towards life that frankly, shocked the hell out of me.



See, I don’t still remember this guy because he broke his neck and taught class sitting down—no, this guy is forever seared into my brain because he was bat-shit crazy. About a week into the class, he just stopped mid-lecture and looked at us (most of us were asleep) and started telling us all to drop-out.

Not just out of his class mind you, but college in general.

“If I was your age, I’d just pack a bag and go explore the world,” he said. “Believe me, we’ll be here waiting for you when you come back.”

By “we’ll be here” he meant school/college. Now that I’m a little older and more settled (read: fucking trapped in my life) I realize that this was actually good advice. But at the time I was just trying to get my Associate’s Degree so I could move out of my parent’s basement. I didn’t want to drop out of school. I didn’t want to back-pack across Europe (isn’t that how one falls prey to werewolf attacks?).

This advice, though sound, was actually a pretty stupid thing for him to say. After all, didn’t his job depend on us being there? And yet he stood (sat) there and was telling us all to ditch school in favor of adventure and excitement. Maps, he liked to remind us, were created by people who’d actually BEEN there. But why should we just take there word for it? Though he never said he had a “motto” per say, I think that if he had one it would be simply “GO.”

I can dig this sentiment of “see if yourself,” because of an odd quirk of mine. You see, I suffer from what I can only describe as severe case of skepticism/narcissism.

I only really believe in the things that are immediately around me.

Every since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by time and space NOT involving myself. For example, the class room where I can Geography still exists. This room may look a little different than the way I remember it, but for the most part it’s the same room. Right now at this second, as I write this.

And yet I am not at this room.

New York. Tokyo. London. These places all exist despite the fact that I’m not there (probably will NEVER be there). Beyond that, these cities exist AND are full of people. People who have no idea that I even exist. People who run along on their own merry little way, with their own merry little problems and triumphs.

I understand that I am not the center of the Universe. There is (or so I’m told) an infinite amount of space stretching in all directions, and it existed before I was born and will continue to do so long after I am dead.

And yet, a large part of me denies this because, how can that be?

Sitting in Geography class you can see Tokyo, Japan on a map. You can see pictures and video, but unless you actually GO there—how can one truly know that Tokyo exists? I think that there is a true version of this world/universe, but I don’t think it’s possible to experience it. Everyone experiences the world a little differently.

Just like no two witnesses tell the exact same story, I think there are probably 9 billion interpretations of Earth and the things on it. That’s kinda what my Geography teacher was saying, I think. People should get out and see the world, instead of taking it for granted that it’s there.

Singing Lessons

It was in the fifth grade that I became a singer. Everything started when I was chosen to perform at the annual Brighton Elementary Christmas Pageant, a decision that filled me with excitement but which, I later realized, should have been terror. I’d never sang publicly before but the notion of all that attention was too good to resist. I liked feeling special, and at eight years old I didn’t have many other options beside, say, learning the provinces of China for an appearance on the Tonight Show. Our school music teacher, Mrs. Alexander, picked me seemingly at random from the twenty or so children in her class, and I was to work with her after school to prepare. I have no idea how she settled on me, as I’m sure there must have been better singers there; perhaps it was because she felt sorry for the round child sitting at the back of the class, belting out songs from Mary Poppins as if his life depended on it.

Mrs. Alexander was a short, thin woman wrinkled and dry from sun exposure and cigarettes, with skin that bordered more or less on the likeness of beef jerky. As I would stand there before her, inside a building that felt abandoned in its silence, I could smell the tobacco clinging to her as if she had been sneaking drags in between classes. During our sessions together, she would sit at an aging upright piano the color of lacquered almonds and I would stand a few feet from her, at a music stand displaying the lyrics to “Silent Night.” My shyness and the pressure to do well made my voice come out raspy and faint, as if I were singing through a tube. Finally in November, just as the last of the leaves were falling away from the trees outside her window, she sighed and stood up from the piano to put her hand on my chest.

If being touched by a teacher is awkward, more disconcerting still is when one caresses you with a hand that smells of Marlboros and looks vaguely like a preserved monkey’s paw.

I stiffened up, suddenly unable to breathe.

Mrs. Alexander, with her scratchy voice, said, “You’re singing from up here.” Her hand traveled from my chest downward, and in the few seconds it took for her hand to reach its destination, my mind stopped working. I had flashes of talks my parents had given me about strangers and how you should scream if someone touched you somewhere uncomfortable. Mrs. Alexander wasn’t a stranger, but this was odd enough. Before I could yell for help though, she stopped at my stomach, pressing her fingers into my belly. “You need to be singing from down here,” she said, pushing a little harder as if to punctuate her advice. That, or threaten me of her growing impatience and that I needed to sing, and sing well.

A month later, after our practices had ended and the big day arrived, my parents brought my three-year-old brother and me to the high school where my classmates and I would perform. My memories of the place make it seem impossibly busy, the gym booming with adult voices as the cafeteria filled with children clamoring over each other as teachers tried to settle them down. We were packed like animals before a traveling circus show, and as my dad took my brother to find seats, my mother helped me get ready, straightening my clip-on tie and running a lint roller over the white button-down shirt she’d insisted I wear.

I felt nervous, probably more so because of the other kids, and had I known then about drugs and the wonderful skills they possess, I might’ve asked my mother for something to settle my nerves. One by one, each class left the room, and as the cafeteria grew quieter my fear began to mount. Finally, my class was called, and everyone but me filed out to perform a three- or four-minute song and dance number about the joys of Christmas — namely family and friends, though most of us kids felt all the worthwhile parts were wrapped in decorative paper and accented with shiny bows. My solo would be the second part of the fifth grade performance, and much to my dismay, my mother left me there to go join my father and brother. She wished me luck, told me she loved me, and then, smiling, abandoned me.

In the minutes between watching my friends exit the room and my own call to action, I wondered if I might be able to throw up on command. I thought that maybe if I were sick, my portion of the evening would be canceled and things would simply move along without me. But no matter how much I thought about it, or how much I wished for something to interrupt the show, nothing came up. I reconsidered the singular desire for attention I’d had back at the beginning, when the idea of singing before an audience was a mere glimmer, a pesky detail to be addressed later. How, I wondered, could I have been so foolish? But before I could answer, it was time to go.

The gym, I remember, was an overwhelming sight for an eight-year-old. Rows upon rows upon rows of parents ran down both sides of the room, and to me it seemed like thousands of adults were there, though it must’ve only been somewhere in the ballpark of eight hundred. Still, that’s pretty intimidating, especially when you’ve just mastered basic multiplication and your knowledge of history goes back about four summers. I drifted out to my spot at the center of the room, taking my place before the music stand. The lyrics I had known so well abandoned me there, and as I stood looking down at the sheets of lyrics so did my ability to read. As she took her seat at the piano next to me, Mrs. Alexander flashed me a smile that in my anxiety read, simply, Don’t fuck this up.

The opening notes of “Silent Night” lifted into the air as the voices of the parents and their elf- and reindeer-dressed children fell quiet. I started to sing, then, but to my surprise things went smoothly. By the end of the song, I had forgotten about where I was, the music having taken over me. The rise of applause drew me back, and I remembered being afraid as if it were something from long ago. I searched the bleachers for my parents, but the faces were distant and blurred together like a watercolor painting dropped in a puddle.

I took my seat next to my class so that I could enjoy the rest of the show, but I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on. Maybe singing wasn’t for me, I considered. I couldn’t stop thinking about all I’d gone through to perform that single song: the jangled nerves, the stench of cigarettes in a grade school classroom, the presence of a teacher’s leathery hand upon my chest. All things that, if told in the right way to the right people, might bring me all the attention I could ever hope for.