The racket is intense and he steps off the pedals and the seat of the bike to straddle it, to lean on the handlebars and just watch the steel behemoth roll by; a steel segmented worm on wheels that on several passing cars carries massive steel sets of train wheels—a train carrying train wheels. What luck, Gene thinks. He listens as above the rumble and bells of the railroad crossing signs, high-pitched squeaks emanate from the wheels on the track. He wonders at those sounds; are they the sounds of the wheels pressing into the rails as the train rocks to and fro? He wonders, leaning on his bike’s handlebars, if he can get close enough to the train, lit only by the red flashing lights of the crossing and the sodium yellow of street lamps, if he could get close enough to the train to see where the high-pitched squeaks of metal-on-metal are coming from. He wonders if he can put his fingers between the wheels and the rail and what it will feel like to have them unrecoverably crushed?

He continues to daydream with the behemoth passing, as he looks as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tip and stampede like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he can feel a difference in the weight of cars that pass over gaps in the tracks. He can feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and the black gaps in the red lights. All the sensations together feel heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would look by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to the sound to see where it goes.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

Characters and Places: Gene Copeland

“I don’t mind doing this—it’s just that I would like to understand it.”

“You will,” Gene says, as he looks up to eye the CCTV camera on the corner of the ceiling of the porch.

“Do you know someone who lives here?”

Gene looks slightly surprised, then looks around and shakes his head, “No.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not the point?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know anyone in this building, but I do know that they have a security system with the camera outside the front door and all and it makes them feel safe…”

“And?”

“Look, if you’re going to employ me in your services, you need to understand a very basic principle.”

“Okay.” When she says this, she tosses her hair over her shoulder, like she does just about every two minutes. And even though he sees it for what it is, he can’t help but helplessly watch as she does it. It’s a tick—the sign of a present irritant and at having to wait for his various obtuse “explanations.” Still though, he keeps tying the balloon to a rock, and tries to take a deep breath because every time she does toss her hair, little particles of sweet-smelling woman cast off into the atmosphere and he just has to catch some particles of beauty. But he returns to reality after tying of the knot on the balloon string. He’s made the placement just right and the balloon floats up just in front of the camera, blocking its never-sleeping eye.

“See?”

“Uh… you blocked the camera.”

“Yeah!”

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash, Unthreaded

Characters and Places: balloon, cameras, Emily Faulk, Gene Copeland, security, sight

He’d come from a place where the roads were named #46 and #124 and they went north and south and southwest and through dales and farms hilly but rolling, not too rocky; and now, looking up to the tops of the clear-cut highways of Kentucky, sheer rock walls of fifty feet, dripping with quick cold small waterfalls on dreary days—what road number was this? A man must walk down so many roads before you call him a man. They can be counted; are counted by the obsessed. What number was this road, this highway carrying him into a life of science and investigation? The sun slamming white on the windshield seems as unyielding as it had in Georgia and Tennessee, just as white and bright and blinding on this clear July weekend, and yet, as usual, the world quickly changes around him; the pace so obviously rapid. Nothing at the arrival would resemble the departure, regardless of the smell of country air. Still, the smell of the air rushing in through the open window smells just the same. Just the same as always. And the color of a summer sky, perfect day, never changes.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

Characters and Places: Gene Copeland, Kentucky, Louisville, U of L

Dead and dead and dead again and again—the dream keeps coming at him in confusion with no acknowledgement of sheets and blankets wrapped actually tight around him; the thermostat set too high to come on. In sleep, he nearly dies from a lightning strike, he nearly dies from the attack of some incomplete animal, large and with huge jaws. Again and again, drowning and suffocating, the dream attacks him. Though some simulated wall of reality he see through to experience three months passing and yet he does not possess the reason to know that there is no business for his being in the Yukon—a place he only supposes because in between attacks from Nature he also knows that he is sending periodic postcards from his far-off outpost. With no understanding of where he is; with no understanding of why he is there, he pens communication only to then be attacked again by cold, snow, relentless vistas of stone, snow and thin prickly trees. And was it the Yukon? Some deep sense told him that he was lost. Surely this place of cold whispering could be anywhere. It does not matter. Where he walks, lightning tears apart a tree only feet from him, the sound stunning him, shocking him, turning his head, only to witness immense flame from the tree and the blast of light ripping away back into a cloudy sky; a flash-bolt arriving from the sky disappearing into what already seemed a familiar scape. A scape undifferentiated from the cold, cold ground that his boots relentlessly trudge through. One step follows another when there does not seem to be to him anywhere to go.

When he awakens, in his bed, it feels as though three months or more has gone by. It takes the alarm clock only seconds to awaken him, but it takes his mind several minutes to calculate, compensate, and regroup around the simple fact that nowhen of that period of time was real. Yesterday was marked on the computer and the date had not really changed. There was no beast, there were no lightning bolts; only a sense of wonder as to why the day he now faced was not so dangerous as he had come to anticipate and perhaps desire—that days passed had possessed no real threats; that threats mattered even in his isolated bungalow of monitors, calculations, estimates, and predictions. A predictable world or a wolf? He rolls out of bed, his sheets spotted with sweat—caused by having forgotten to turn down the conservative thermostat temperature from earlier the previous day—to stretch, shower and head in to the office.

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash, Mostly Dead

At one time in his life he would have been hard pressed not to fiddle with the various models and trinkets on the neurologist’s desk, but the last few weeks had drained him, leaving him disoriented; a sense that had crept in to other facets of his mind, even his physicality. What began as the larva of belief, an unusual but undeniable feeling, eventually bore its way into an abatement of hygiene. He’d stopped washing or shaving. When Anna grew too tired of it, she would bathe him, but it gave him no relief. He spent long hours sitting and staring at nothing, an act that felt more comfortable to him in the twilight. In those moments of unpresence there was just some floating observation of a room and the shadows in it, but no one was witness. Just as well since Anna had ceased sleeping in the bed with him; didn’t seem to want to have much to do with him at all and he didn’t blame her, given his condition. Of course, she didn’t really understand. She used words like “depression” and “cold” and “distant”—all observations from the other side of the walls of whimsical perception, walls we cannot always see through in both directions—he could see both ways and she couldn’t understand.

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash, Mostly Dead

Characters and Places: Anna Groseclose, dead, Hamilton Groseclose

Oh, I could die right now, he thinks as he watches the last 33 seconds of Phantogram’s “Futuristic Casket” count down on his iTunes. His lair feels like a futuristic casket; with his Britney Spears literacy poster and his gloss pens to draw on it and make her in to catwoman. With the cavernous clouds overhead, casting his windows in a pale light of grey, this could be a perfect time to go in to the nothingness. He’s got quests, yes, but it does no harm to dwell on the nothingness of the moment.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

After paying off some debts (in the sum of 1600 gold pieces) tonight (for credit cards) and realizing again that I had some freedom from the brokers and guilds, I started looking around this amazing apartment of mine. It’s no wonder I call it a lair. Batman’s got his darkness and trophies, and so do I! I have trophies that show that I’ve helped designed and make toys, that I ride a bike, that I stole a highway sign once, that I (apparently) like to take apart and collect pieces of electronics, that I have a healthy appreciation of art and books, that I will sleep in my living room[^1], that I love the majesty of the inanimate becoming animate (nicely framed wind-up toys). I’ve even framed and hung classic literary works that I’ve read and admire. (One of them I haven’t actually read—Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”—I swapped it out for one that I’m reading now. I’ll get to all of them; although I do sometimes feel that the amount I’m supposed to read is a flurry of pages around my head. But, I’m getting better these days, and I WILL get to them. There is much time.

Back to the lair! You see how that sounds? It makes it easy for me to stay late at work until I’m tired and stressed because there is such release in knowing that as soon as you finish this one daunting task, it’s BACK TO THE LAIR!!!

At any rate, it took some kind of Karma of the day to just get me to lie down on the bed early in the day (instead of being the usual night owl) and just take a survey of my surroundings. Most everything here is something I did or created. When you really step back to look at it, it’s a museum. But MUSEUM sounds so boring. I much prefer lair. Several times this evening while drawing, i jumped up to get a pencil of a particular weight or an eraser, or more paper, and I had to search for none of those things. They were right there, just like the weapons of an art ninja. Nah, ninja’s are passé. Besides, my Epic Win character is Thorin the Thoughtful, Swarthy Dwarven Toiler. And I think I had a moment (several) of weakness this week. But lo, I am only fourth level, and there is very, very far to go!

It is useful to have a lair when one seeks adventure.

[^1]: Something about the arrangement of my building—an old factory of some sort—all the apartments are split-lofts with spiral staircases—something about that makes everyone put their bed upstairs. I put the workshop upstairs (and by workshop I mean play room). The bed is right next to the living room couch. Whatever. When I have company over, it’s made and makes a good extra couch. LAIR.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

SCUBA is an acronym as opposed to an intialism. You can pronounce it, and that, apparently, makes all the difference. The first time Gene passed his SCUBA class, the hardest part was when the instructor took him down to the bottom of the fourteen foot deep diving area and then he had to slowly let our air until he reaches the surface. Slowly let the air out. Much deeper and much faster and you get the bends. Gene’s not exactly sure what that is, but he doesn’t want it. The ascent at the bottom of the pool starts “normally” enough. With breathing apparatus, Gene is at the bottom of the pool—breathing, no less. Then the blue shadow of the instructor reaches out for the mouth piece. At this point, Gene takes a big deep breath off of the tank and hands it all over to the instructor. Looking up, Gene can see the fluorescent lights from the top of the University’s pool facility; shimmering. The very idea of taking a breath rests just above him. It’s clear in patches, a space between the water and the ceiling where there is nothing but air. He launches himself from the floor of the pool, beginning to count down from 10. With each number arises a desire to get the countdown over with and arise from the surface, but the instructor is counting too, and so this must be timed accurately. Slowly, he rises close to the air, holding what he has in his lungs until just the number two comes up and he knows he is one second away from gulping air. The sound of coming up has a reverb bounced from the rails and beams and wavy steel of the Natatorium. He takes a breath. Done. Ten seconds from 14 feet down. Now he can SCUBA.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

He pulls away. “It’s just that you’re too cool to sleep with.”

“Huh?” In the back corner of a booth in the back of a nicely lit, red dive bar, she was just about to put her lips to him. Then he says that.

“Oh god. Not this shit,” she sighs.

“What?”

“I’m not you’re bestest girlfriend just because we’ve hung out this much. Ok?”

“What!? You tried to kiss me!”

“Yeah, like, slutty. Stop trying to make us a ‘thing’.”

“Ok?”

“What?”

“I thought I was giving you a compliment…”

“Don’t, Gene…”

“You rocked my world tonight! Everything I said was different from what you had to say. But we didn’t pause on stupid contradictions. We just went from one subject to the next and there was no problem!” Gene pauses to smile—grinny— and through the froth on his beard he says, “We disagree on a lotta’ shit, but we still get along.”

“Well—yeah. We get along.” The one side of her cheek puckers when she’s being smug.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

“You can’t do that. You can’t just expect me to be fine with living with a stranger just because you all can’t keep track of a simple list. That’s all it is, a list. People, rooms. Why is that hard?” He was rapidly losing his civility, but was still more determined not to give in.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Copeland, but it was a computer error. There were two room listings for 400 when they’re should’ve been only one.”

“You can’t blame the computer, it’s a dumb machine. Someone in your department created two listings or entered the number twice. The computer didn’t decide to get it wrong. And that’s your department’s problem. And since you’re speaking with me, that makes it your problem. And if you can’t do anything about it, then you need to put me in touch with someone who can.”

And now, modern reader, can you guess what happened next? Yes! The geometric modern trajectory of phone calls, forms and hierarchies pulled Gene Copeland ever onward from office to office, building to building, hold song (“Dancing in the Moonlight,” King Harvest, 1973) to hold song (“Belero” Maurice Ravel, 1928) until he landed at last, in front of an old factory building. He’d won, yes, because he would not have a roommate in this place, but then, had he really won? The site of the industrial-era leviathan caused him to hear the faint shoomp sounds of pneumatic tubes and wonder to himself if we were really any better off.

Gene shrugs. Fair enough.

Read the whole story so far: A Field Guide to the Socially Inept

Characters and Places: bureaucracy, dancing in the moonlight, Gene Copeland, kafkaesque, roommates