..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Sunday, August 17, 2003

"I don't believe in the existence of angels...but if I did I would summon them together and ask them to watch over you..."
-Nick Cave

"Holy Toledo Batman!"


well that was disturbing. i click on the computer and my website has a bunch of gibberish on it so i log into blogger and see that my template is gone. remember in the movie The Thing when the monster stole the generator to make his flying saucer and they go to see why the power is out:

"The generator? It's gone."
"Can you fix it?"
"It's GONE."

that was me. the first three lines of the template were there and the rest was erased. what the fuck? so i pulled up a cached image of a search engine result and viewed the source (not all of it came up and it didn't have any of the changes i've made) and started typin' and cuttin' and pastin.' i want to thank rose for sending me the blueprint for her template so i could dig around and try to figure stuff out. and much thanks to t-bone for offering to help too. it took a few hours and it made me think, if this shit was gone tommorrow i'd be in a bad state. i didn't realize how dependent on this blog stuff i'd gotten. i mean, i fairly new at all this computer stuff and never saw myself addicted to any internet activities but when faced with the prospect of all my shit being gone just like that...i was down and fucking OUT. i've since learned to save a copy of the template (i should have done that before but i just started this thing) and i saved all my achives for the hell of it so i'm learnin.' so THEN i hook up my MP3 player to do some pushups and exhaust myself into not thinking and the MP3 player makes this noise like a tiny toilet flushing and says "Hard Disc Error." then i go downstairs to try the desk computer to look up online manuals for the player and the light in the mouse goes out when i touch it and won't come back on. dude. i'm starting to think i'm like fucking electro-boy or something. the touch of doom. THEN, the real mail shows up. With my latest round of rejection notices. i never thought i'd need to have readers but thinking about the blog crash and the lack of published work and any script sale, i'm really starting to crave this shit.

i always told myself, i write scripts for movies i'd want to see, and i wrote that book because i wanted to write something that said shit other books wouldn't, and stories that went places where other stories would seem like they were going to go, but never quite got there. in college i had a little cult following that enjoyed reading my stuff and looked forward to the next story i'd crank out and that was enough. i could have gone on like that indefinitly. i figured if no one published anything, so what? what did that mean, publishing? a faceless person agreed it was worth reading? i already knew that. and so did some people on campus. i was doing it for me, i thought. now i'm thinking that wasn't the case, now i'm thinking it had a lot to do with them too. and not just them, anyone who stopped to read anything i wrote.

in other words, i need readers more than i want to admit and the idea that this is the only place my thoughts and ideas can be seen by anyone, and it could be erased in the blink of an eye weighs heavy on my fucking head right now.

back in the day i looked forward to those people reading my stories more than i thought and right now i miss it. i even miss when those couple students i couldn't stand would boycott class when my stories were workshopped because they were so offended. i even miss getting their evaluations (the little bastards HAD to do one to keep their straight A's) and i thought i was irritated but i couldn't wait to read what they had to say. i read theirs first to find out about what made them angry enough to stage their little protest (i'll put that story up here at some point) and i glared at em the next week but right now i think i'd give them a fucking hug.

i miss someone at a bar saying "you write anything lately" and, at the end of the night, me grabbing a 5 page story out of my car to slap into their hand. and i miss the co-workers at the bookstore who would sneak stories up by the cash register and read and comment on them while we were on the clock. and i miss Rachel, my unofficial editor, who would take her red pen and cross out whole sections between zombie movie night and i would try to argue about how i could NOT lose a single word and i'd take it out anyway. and i miss Jan my other unofficial editor who would read something, seem to forget about it, then a month later hand me five pages of handwritten comments that made me so excited i'd crank out something that night and i miss that ex-girlfriend FINALLY reading something i wrote and saying it made her sad and feel like she had a hole in her stomach and i miss that teacher in sixth grade reading that story i wrote about nuclear sand-crabs and saying "i can't put this in the school newspaper" and i miss my friend glen reading a story of mine in high school and offering only a four word critique of it on our way to see Wild At Heart, "sounds like you talking" and i miss that time that girlfriend sneaked into my apartment by lying to my roommate to get his key and then sitting in the corner to read hundreds of my pages and then left them lying on the floor. and i miss how i got mad about her getting in my stuff but secretly smiling to myself that she had the guts to do that.

and i miss that time i gave that long 60 page story to T to read. okay, wait. before i talk about that 60 page story i got to talk about something else. there's three things i think of when i remember T. the first thing, i don't feel like talking about. the second thing:

i remember how things started going bad because of her crazy religious family and how i got her little sister a birthday present that they thought was "satanic." it was a deck of playing cards that had nursery rhymes on each page of a small book and then a representation of the poem in the card, like the spades would be the markings on the backs of bees, or the diamonds were cats eyes reflected in a fish bowl etc. and there was a riddle involved with the poems that you had to figure out too. they caught my eye because there was a spider on it and they were very creative and i even bought a couple decks for myself, my friend Holly, my little sister and at least two other people. it was one of those things you see that you think is so cool that everyone should have it. and there was nothing inappopriate about them at all. but they came with this little hardcover book that started with a quote saying, "at one time playing card were thought to be an instrument of the devil..." and it went on to tell the history of cards 'n shit. anyway, apparenly T's little sister woke up crying and they saw the word "devil" in that tiny book and called me up to bitch me out about it. i got in this long debate with her dad with me saying how the whole point of that quote was to describe how people were crazy back then and did stupid shit in the name of religion and he goes on to tell me that he didn't read the whole thing because he actually burned the cards (!) in the burn barrell out back so that she could go to sleep. i fucking lost it. i was like, "you actually stood there and BURNED playing cards because you saw the word "devil?" i told him that, with that logic, he should burn his precious fucking bible because it has the word devil in it thousands of time. i told him that HE made it seem like that word was dangerous by showing his daughter that he had to destroy them with a fucking fire out in the yard for her to be safe. i told him he was a fucking idiot and a horrible parent and, even though we'd gone sky-diving together and bonded, i wasn't sure if i ever really knew what kind of person he was. so he says that we should avoid each other and i ended the conversation saying that the only thing we could agree on was our feelings for T and he thought that wasn't enough common ground to ever talk again. i said goodbye and thought "fuck that zealot, i don't need to get along with him to be with her" but shit doesn't work that way. and, when T found out about the conversation and tried to get me to see his side of the argument, well i never really forgave her for that.

and the third thing i remember about her? it was long before that incident and i don't know why i felt the need to flashback to that card burning story. it's just always on my mind when i think back to her, like i wasn't done pleading my case, as if i could convince her that her dad was wrong enough to rehash that nonsense. i don't know where she is but sometimes i feel like sending her a letter.

the third thing though? it was when i gave her that 60 page story to read. i'd spent too much time on it and it was too dramatic and too vulgar and i couldn't see that at the time and thought it was the shit. She finally strugged her way through it and finished it and handed it back one night afraid to tell me that she didn't like it. i was frustrated with her, even though i subconsciously knew the story sucked, and that night (i still can't believe i did this shit) i left my gym bag on the hood of my car like a dumbass when i was leaving her apartment. all my stuff, clothes, notebooks, pages, videos, glasses, tape recorder, they all went flying down ten miles of road while i sat under it all oblivious and drove along listening to a typically awful Toledo classic rock station. i remember slowly realizing what i'd done when i got back home and couldn't find the bag in the car. and i called her in a panic to see if maybe my bag was still at her apartment or in her parking lot. it wasn't and i tore off into the night and backtracked and punched the dashboard when i started to see the pages on the road. i jumped out and only found two or three though. i was splashing around the ditch when i saw T's headlights, coming from the other direction. she stepped out with a car load of wet pages, covered in tiretracks and gravel. we spent another hour gathering up the strays but i never found the bag. i ended up losing a good pair of glasses, some blue jeans, my mini tape recorder and the two movies i'd taken over there that night to watch. i remember the movies because i had to buy them again, "Weeds" and "Internal Affairs." and i remember there were about 12 pages i never found and spent weeks trying to recreate.

At the time, all i did was talk to her about how some stranger might have that bag and my clothes and movies and maybe they even read the couple pages that didn't fly out. but now, all i can think about is how she got up at 3am without me asking her to, and inched along the highway, stepping out into the dark to pick up pages of a story she didn't even like. she recovered most of that story off the side of the road that night and i just wish the story would have been good enough to deserve that. if i knew where she was right now, i swear the first words out of my mouth would be to thank her.

::: david - 12:15 AM [+] :::
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