Brief Review: The Lego Movie

Above all else, the 1980s Spaceman Benny from "The Lego Movie" stands out.  Not only because of his endearing obsession with building a spaceship (and particularly how that obsession pays off), but because of the character's helmet.  If you are of a certain age, you will remember how the thin bottom of the spaceman's helmet would always crack but never fall off.

Spaceman Benny's helmet was cracked in that very same spot.

It's that kind of loving detail that makes "The Lego Movie" absolutely awesome.  It's an animated action comedy that exists somewhere between the heart of Pixar movies like "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" and the snark of "Shrek."  It involves the quest of every-Lego-man Emmet and his friends as they try and stop President Business from destroying the world.  Explaining more would eliminate the goofy joy of watching the plot develop.

What the movie does best is capture the imaginative joy of a child playing with a bunch of toys and creating such outlandish scenarios that involve Batman meeting Han Solo and Abraham Lincoln.  It truly is awesome.

My Disease

            I stare in my reflection on the stainless steel door while I bounce my legs.  I feel the uncomfortable sweat as I strain to hold.  I hear the water run, the paper towel dispense, the door shut.  I count to five and listen for anyone else.  When I’m certain I’m alone, I explode.  In that instant I don’t care who listens.  The embarrassment comes immediately after, when the murmurs I could hear before silence for a few seconds.  Great.  The cute librarian with glasses was out there.

            And that’s my Crohn’s Disease.  It’s more than a chronic inflammation of my gastrointestinal tract.  It’s a nine pills a day, ten trips to the bathroom, twenty-four rolls of toilet paper a week, eight and a half colonoscopies kind of disease.  It’s diarrhea in the morning and constipation in the evening.  It’s approaching a woman to ask her out only to have your stomach speak for you.  It’s a twelve ounce cup of banana-flavored barium.  It’s bowel prep.  I found a list of symptoms on the website for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America (ccfa.org).  Persistent diarrhea, rectal bleeding, an urgent need to move one’s bowels, abdominal cramps and pains, sensation of incomplete evacuation, constipation, fever, loss of appetite, weight loss, fatigue, night sweats, and loss of normal menstrual cycle. 

            I have managed to maintain my normal menstrual cycle.  That would be a small consolation if I had a menstrual cycle.  But I don’t.

            Fifteen years ago, I collapsed in my apartment.  The pain kept me on the floor in my boxers for an hour.  The pain was like a madman with a knife stabbing outwards, trying to pierce the wall of my lower abdomen so he could come and simply peel open the tear and do with my guts as he wished.  My one-year-old son played and laughed and had just a grand old time as I laid in his room in agony.  Jerk.

            I took off work to see the doctor, and he stuck his finger up my ass.  A month later, he stuck a camera up my ass.  That time he gave me anesthesia.  I had heard horror stories about the whole colonoscopy experience, but my first colonoscopy went smoothly.  All I remember was sitting up once during the procedure, taking a look the insides of my bowels on the monitor, and exclaiming, “That’s so cool!”

            The coolness wore off four years later.  Instead of laughing at my condition, I was screaming at it from a hospital bed.  Once again, I had collapsed, this time in my parents’ study.  They took me to the emergency room.  The tall male nurse asked me what was wrong. 

            I vomited blood on his clogs.

            I give the nurse credit.  He kept his nerve: “I see.  Now, on a scale of one to ten, how’s your pain?”

            For two months, I laid on my couch pondering my failing body.  I’d raise my arm as if I was closing the blinds behind me, but I would keep the arm limp.  It was just bone.  A pole, really.  No form to it.  No muscle.  Just a long pole of flesh.  It had muscle before.  My whole body faded like that.  Too often I traced the outline of my ribcage when I took a breath.  I looked like a fourteen year old with chest hair.

            I lost thirty pounds in two months.  At work, people stopped to tell me I looked like an old man, how I walked all hunched, how I let my beard grow out.  I weighed 130 pounds.  I weighed 130 in high school.  I also ran cross country and played basketball and racquetball in high school.  I was healthy.  I stepped out of the shower and I looked like a teenager.  Now, I looked like a dank rat crawling out of the sewer.  Bags hung under my eyes, lines indented my cheekbones, and gray hairs appeared in my stubble. 

            The flare-up nearly killed me.  I writhed on my toilet, desperate to see anything in that pot besides yellow.  No clue why it was yellow, since all I drank for those months was water.  I prayed for the diarrhea to return, the days of six trips to the bathroom, because then I wouldn’t feel the pain of trying to squeeze a turd the size of a penny out of my ass.  My inability to defecate left me with little appetite.  Two months of food wasted in the freezer.  Instead, I dined on crackers, bread, and water.  Prisoners eat better.

            A failed colonoscopy discovered signs of a blockage.  I needed surgery.  Parts of my intestines had fused together, and in that process the parts had perforated.  The William Hurt doppelganger who took out two feet of my intestines told my mother I should be dead.  This was after the surgery, but before I woke up in total agony.  And screamed at my nurses, “It hurts!  It fucking hurts!  It mother fucking hurts!” 

            That’s a direct quote.  I remember it so vividly because it’s the only time I’ve ever cursed in front of my parents.  But it’s not the worst pain I’ve ever felt.  Let me tell you how I had a stent removed from my kidneys...    

Work in Progress, Part 1: A Dog Tried to Eat Me

I've been working on this essay for a while.  This is a first draft, and I should have another draft up next week.  It's not a finished draft, but I realize that parts aren't working.  As a whole, it's pretty far from what I envisioned, and not in a good way to me.  Still, parts of it I'm quite proud of.  Enjoy.  

            A dog tried to eat me.

            That dog.  Right there.  On the other side of the fence.  Pacing, stalking me as I lay bloodied on this sticky grass, my mother beside me with her face buried in her knees.

            That dog.  Staring, leering at my unscathed left leg, my two boys across the street clutching each other in a frightened embrace.

            That dog.  Barking, yelling at the cops, medics, looky-loos -- yelling at everyone to leave so it can finish its lunch in peace.

            A dog tried to eat me!

            “Don’t worry.  They’re going to put that fucking thing down.”

            That dog, that beast, that hound.  I never saw it coming.  Had my back turned with my sons three steps behind.  We were walking to Grandma’s house to play in the pool.  It was going to wear them out.  A relaxing Saturday evening ahead.

            Then, the barking.  Then, the yelling.  Then, the large gray dog chewing on my ass.

            “Hey, buddy.  Can you hear me?  Lean your head back.”

            “Wow.”

            A large gray dog with white fur around its mouth.  That dog, there, on the other side of the fence.  Won’t someone get it away from me?  We’re right up on this curb barely two feet away from this flimsy chain link fence, and that’s the only thing keeping Cujo from seconds.  Seriously, it’s fucking hot out.  This sun’s warming me like leftovers.  I’m laying in grass.  Why aren’t I itchy?  Will someone please get this dog out of here?  Why aren’t I itchy?  I’m in the grass.  I should be itchy.  I can’t feel my leg.  Why can’t I feel my leg?  Where’s the pain?  There’s no pain.  I can see my bone from here.  I should be in pain.

            “Whoa.  Why’s my leg so white?” I ask the paramedic, I think.  Maybe a cop.

            “Mh-hm.  What’s your name?”

            No direct answer. 

            Yep, that’s five inches of my tibia I’m looking at.  It’s a rectangular band of the whitest white I’ve ever seen.  More virginal than a wedding gown.  The skin that is supposed to stretch around my ankle instead folds over either side of the wound like worn out bands of elastic.  The red surrounding my exposed bone is not all blood.  Tendons, I’m assuming.

            Oh God.  I’m sobering up.  A young man with a crew cut dresses my ankle while an older man checks the rest of my wounds.  A man in a navy jacket and a green sweater vest tries to explain how he brought my mother here.  More people come into focus.  A female police officer with a tight blond bun crouches as she speaks with the boys.  An ugly fat woman in a bloodied white tank top stands in the street yelling at another police officer. 

            “They just stormed out of the house.  I couldn’t hold them,” the fat woman tells the officer.  That’s the owner.  That’s right!  She stumbled out of the house when I was on the ground wrestling for my life.

            “Are they going to be put down?” my mom asks no one in particular.

            Wait.

            They? 

            Where’s the other one?  I only see one.  I only see one.

            “Matt?  Matt?  I want you to lie still.  We’re going to put you on this stretcher.”  

            Where’s the other one?

            I see a woman standing in line at a register in Target.  She’s not very attractive to me, but I can’t stop staring.  Why?

            That’s it.  I photographed her and her family almost a year ago at Joan of Arc.

            Why do I remember this?  I see this woman, this ordinary woman, completely out of context.  I spent maybe ten minutes with her and her family, yet almost a year later I recognize her.  Then, I remember Joan of Arc and the reek of fried fish.  Then the guy who ate at Friendly’s and said it was overrated.  Then eating at a Friendly’s restaurant in West Virginia.  The burlesque club in Manhattan.  The karaoke machine we found on the way home.  The crazy cat girl.  Lazybones.

            It can go on forever.  Or until you run out of memories.  Or until you die.

            I wonder if that’s how your brain reacts to stress or anxiety or trauma.  I wonder if that’s how your life flashes before your eyes.  Strange how the brain works.  You have memories you want to remember.  You have memories you have to remember.  And you have memories you don’t realize exist until they’re triggered by a word, a song, a dog.  And they change.  The importance of some are inflated.  The severity of an emotion is diminished.  A remembered kiss never really happened.  The memory itself becomes something it never truly was.  Or the memory stays forever etched exactly as it happened.   

            Completely absurd.  Completely random.  Take that manhole cover under the ambulance...

            I stand in my roller blades digging through the damp leaves at my feet when a dark shape clouds the spotlight over me.  I stand up, and an ass wrapped in jean shorts stares at me.  Legs extend from the ass and carry it down the rust iron ladder.  A white tee shirt tucked into the short, and brown hair covered the neck and shoulders.

            Lisa lived in O’Fallon.  She was in Jessie’s dance class.  She flirted with everyone but me.  She shied away from my tousled hair and scrawny figure.  I was used to being ignored by girls.  What scared me was the Friday night she stroked my hand.  Sean, Jessie, Lisa and I sat in Jessie’s living room watching TV.  Lisa and I were on the couch, and she had been inching toward me.  I hadn’t noticed.  Until her soft touch electrified me. 

            I tensed up.  What just happened?  The answer came when she stroked the inside of my hand with her fingers.  Then she placed a pillow against my leg so she could lay down.  She took my hand and guided it through her soft brown hair.  I loved the feeling of a fifteen-year-old woman’s hair.

            Now I stand at the bottom of a sewer.  I stare as Lisa bends over to pick up the puck.  She hands it to me.  We never say a word.  We just stare at each other, and for a second I think I love her.  If nerves equate to love, then I do.

            The sewer starts changing.  It darkens as the ground lowers.  The ladder stands out of reach.  And the mold on the walls inch closer and closer.  But an updraft scrapes that mold right off.  The walls stop moving, but the leaves encircle us.  We stand in a tornado of passion.  The moisture from the leaves spray onto us.  Or is that our sweat.  We can’t wait any longer.  I pull her waist to mine, and our lips meet.  My nevermind presses into her leg and our tongues dance forever.  We kiss for all the other kids who have never enjoyed this guilty pleasure. We kiss to save the world.  We kiss until we are interrupted by…

           

            Mom’s crying.  She’s still on the curb next to me.  She’d been riding her exercise bike.  I can tell by the tennis shoes and the paint-stained jean shorts and the tee shirt.  The guy in the sweater vest must have pounded on the door for at least five minutes to get her to answer.  I can hear her terse “what” when she answered.  And it’s obvious she just walked out the door with no thought to her appearance.  Her oldest was in the middle of the street, a rabid dog’s chew toy.  Her baby was hurt.  For all she knew, he was dying.

            They put me on the stretcher, and she’s still crying…

           

            All night, perhaps.  I think we’re done for now.  A pleasant conversation.  I’m not sure I said five words.  Just like the car ride the night before.

            When I hopped into the car, Dad could tell something was wrong.  He asked, and I told him I had something I needed to tell him.  Then we drove in silence for ten minutes until I stepped out of the car in front of our house.  He left for work, and I snuck out to my girlfriend’s, where we had erratic teenaged sex all night.  I snuck back in, but Mom and Dad and my journal were waiting at the kitchen table.

            And now, in the living room, I’m draped in a blue-flowered comforter.  I have apparently called in sick to school.  I am apparently seeking counseling.  I am apparently not having a child.

            Dad looks serious.  He never looks serious.  With his walrus mustache and Civil War muttonchops it’s difficult.  He seems resigned to being a grandfather a little sooner than he thought. 

            Of course Mom’s going to fight it.  She won’t have her son ruined by this…problem.  Oh, she’ll fight.  Abortion, dammit.  Get a damn abortion.  I don’t care if she doesn’t want it.  I do.  Convince her.

           

            Nolan and Calvin clutch each other, tears of terror dripping down their faces.  God, how will they remember this?  What will happen when they walk by a fence and a large dog on the other side barks?  Will they jump?  Will they run away?  I now remember a black dog pouncing me at my friend’s house when I was nine or ten.  And I remember walking Baby for a neighbor.  A squirrel darted into our path, and that Doberman dragged me into a stair railing.  Thought I broke some ribs.  But I’d forgotten those moments until just now.  

            The female officer with the tight bun is talking to the boys.  We wave, but we haven’t been able to talk. 

            The ugly fat woman’s talking to another officer.  Hopefully about the other dog.  I hope someone shot it.

            From the stretcher, I see the black and red grass where I had been laying.  I don’t see the grey dog.  Hopefully someone shot it twice. 

            I’m riding with him, my mom says.  She’d been riding her exercise bike.  She’s wearing her tennis shoes and paint-stained jean shorts that go to her knees and one of Dad’s old tee shirts that just drapes her short frame.

            From the ambulance, I see the fuss I’ve become.  Four police cars with flashing lights.  Pine street’s barricaded with a crowd on either side.  A news truck’s antennae peeks over a nearby house.

            The doors shut and sirens blare. 

            Is that necessary? Mom asks.

            Yes ma’am, the medic says as Mom clutches my hand.  Your son’s lost a lot of blood.  It’s just a precaution.  Nothing to worry about.

            Oh, right.  I’m supposed to believe that, she says in that condescending way she saves for everyone but her loved ones.  Or especially her loved ones.  I tell her I have a girlfriend.  She asks, Why?

            Why were you coming over?

            Boys wanted to play in the pool.

            It’s not warm enough for that.

            Sure it is.  Besides, they wouldn’t care.  It’d wear them out.

            I see them hugging each other.  How are they? I ask.

            I think they were fine.

            In the emergency room I lay on my side on a gurney while a cute nurse cuts away my ruined clothes.  She holds up the remnants of my Spongebob boxers.

            I just bought those.

            Very nice.

            A male nurse arrives to clean my wounds.

           

            It hurts.  It fucking hurts.  It motherfucking hurts.

            Mom and Dad hover at the foot of the bed.  Two nurses fiddle with the machines.

            Can you do something?  He never complains about pain, Mom says.

            We’ve given him all the morphine he’s allowed for the moment.

            I think I pass out.

            A couple months earlier, I’d collapsed in my parents’ library.  They took me to the ER in St. Joseph’s.  The tall male nurse asked me what was wrong.

            I vomited blood on his clogs.

            I see.  Now, on a scale of one to ten, how’s your pain?

            Now, three months later, I’ve just had two feet of my large intestine removed.  I no longer have a sigmoid colon.  I have four scars on my abdomen.  My doctor, a William Hurt doppelganger, will tell my mother I should be dead.

           

            I’m laying on the couch with my left arm limp but raised up, as if I were closing the blinds behind me but just gave up.  My arm’s just bone.  A pole, really.  No form to it.  No muscle.  Just a long pole of flesh.  It used to have muscle.  My whole body’s faded like this.  I see the outline of my ribcage when I breathe.  I look like a fourteen year old with chest hair.

            I’ve lost thirty pounds in two months.  At work, people stop to tell me I look like an old man, how I walk all hunched, how I’ve let my beard grow out.  I weigh 130 pounds.  I weighed 130 in high school.  That was when I ran cross country and played racquetball and basketball.  I was healthy.  I stepped out of the shower, and I looked like a teenager.  Now, I look like a dank rat crawling out of the sewer.  I have bags under my eyes, lines along my cheekbones, facial stubble, sometimes a few gray hairs.

            Small yellow shit stains rot the inside of my toilet.  Coke cans and toilet paper rolls and beer bottles and shaving creme cylinders clutter its back.  The beige linoleum floor might be comfortable to sleep on if it could forget how cold it feels under my feet.  For five minutes, I could curl into a ball and snooze against the bathtub.

            This flare-up has me writhing on the toilet, desperate to shit, desperate to see anything in that pot besides yellow piss.  No clue why it’s yellow, since all I've been drinking for two months has been water.  I pray for diarrhea to return, the days of six trip to the bathroom, because then I never felt the pain of trying to squeeze a turd the size of a penny out of my ass.  My inability to defecate has left me with little appetite.  Two months of food in the freezer, and I've been dining on crackers, bread and water.  Prisoners eat better.

            Monday morning, and I’m trapped.  By an expiring marriage.  By chronic disease.  By life.

            The walls of the bathroom try to engulf me.  I stretch my arms out and feel the walls graze my fingertips as I spin in place.  My dizziness causes me to trip over the cracked shower stool next to the toilet, where the vent rests above.  I could climb on the stool and squeeze through the vent.  It’s the size of a brick, but I once read about a contortionist. I could channel his experience and escape.  I could scale the wall and throw myself through the duct like a dart and come out of the house with my head in the tree in the front.

            Bulls eye.

            Enough spots on the mirror push aside the fog so I can shave.  The faucet stained with toothpaste and shaving crème spouts water that tastes a bit like blood.  The shaving gel chills my neck.  Drops of gel fall into the waterfall with shards of red hair clinging for life.  The hair holds on as it swirls down the drain.  Should I join it? If I were a shard of hair, I’d be free.  I’d race down the drain to the sewer, where I’d climb out and catch a bus to Montana, because Montana is boring, and no one ever talks about it.

            The last roll of toilet paper spins on the roller.  It could be of more use.  I could coast down the steps on that roll, and soar on the white magic carpet out the window and flip through the trees and fly away.

            I shake my head out of the daydream and turn back to the mirror to wash my face.  My father stares at me from the other side.  I see his scruff, his brown eyes, his jangling pockets and easy-going demeanor.  Then I see my mother with her chiseled chin and allergies and intellect and quick temper.  Their looks plead for more.

            No.  today I will not die.

            So far, Ive failed.  Maybe the Catholic God wants me to suffer and repent.  Maybe Allah wants me to submit to his will.  Que sera sera.  Maybe Yahweh wants me to just fuck off.  I’m on my own.

            Or maybe there’s nothing.

            No.

            Fuck that.

            Fuck.

            That.

            I heard the boys scream before anything.  A tug on my ass.  I turn to see the grey dog on my right buttock.  I backhand it, and it lets go.  The orange dog nips at the grey one as I push my boys behind me.  They clasp each other.  The grey dog bites my calf.  I pull the dog along up the street.  The orange dog circles us.  I yell for help.  I yell for the boys to run.  I yell scared.  I kick my leg free and kick at the dog’s head.  I hit my target, but it immediately snatches my ankle.  I tug it free.  I try to plant it.  I collapse.  The leg is jello.  The grey dog charges.  The orange dog pounces the grey one.  I crawl.  The two dogs tangle.  My boys scream.  The fat woman tries to break it up.  The fool!  Now the grey dog’s back on me.  Its paw to my left shoulder.  It claws my back.  I’m helpless.  I can’t move.  I sit up.  It bites my shoulder.  I flail.  It goes for my throat.  Mouth wide open.  Teeth fleshy.

            And I get my hands around that thing’s fucking throat and squeeeeeeeeze.  It yelps.  It snaps at me, but I get my right arm over it and grab the thing in a tiring headlock.

            I lay on the bed of my brother’s room.  I’m surrounded by change.  I used to pile my jeans and khakis and dress shirts and tee shirts on the dresser.  Michael has his Christmas stereo with Limp Bizkit and Korn and Pantera.  That shelf above the bed used to display my basketball and racquetball trophies.  Now it holds Granddad’s Texas Longhorns helmet.  My posters too are gone.  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Casablanca, The Truman Show, A Clockwork Orange all have been replaced by images of Isaac Bruce and Marshall Faulk.  He still has my desk.  The desk Dad made me that was too tall.  I had to kneel on the chair so I could be comfortable doing my Calculus.  Michael has a Playstation and a TV on top of it.  I never had a TV in here.

            I look out the window to the right of the desk, and I still see that gray blob in the upper left corner.  That wasp’s nest has been there for over ten years, but I still don’t dare to open the window.  The last time I did, I was stung.  I want to snoop in the closet next to the window, but it’s locked.  Mom always kept it locked, even though it was my closet.  I kept my baseball cards in there, and I felt I had to sneak into Mom’s room to find the key.  It was a heavy silver skeleton key with an orange tassel tied to the end.  It opened every door in the house.  Whenever my parents weren’t home I would go around the house and scrounge through all the locked doors just to see what was being kept from me. 

            Two times I've almost died.  I fear the third will be the charm.

            But not yet. 

            Today I will not die.  A failed husband still.  A weekend father, sure.  But dead?  No, not a chance.

            I see a dog and imagine laying on the ground, my larynx in its mouth. 

            I try to scream.  Instead, I gargle my own blood, the last act of my messy, above ground dying.

            But that didn’t happen.

            I survived.

            A dog tried to eat me.

My Goatee is Not a Goatee?

My beard is itchy.  I need to shave.  But do I just trim?  Do I dare go clean-shaven during this frigid winter?  Do I shave everything but the mustache, like so many of my relatives?  Or do I keep the goatee, like I have for over a decade?

Except my goatee is not a goatee.  No, the goatee is simply the hair on thin chin that resembles the hair on a goat's chin.

Now, my fondness for goats not withstanding, I do prefer the circle beard, which is what most people call the goatee, the beard with the mustache grown to meet with the goatee and soul patch, thus circling the mouth.  I've maintained my circle beard since my early twenties, when a girl I was dating told me the circle beard helped me look like "a sexy baseball player."

Of course, everyone who knows me knows I look like a sexy hockey player, but who am I to quibble while in the throws of passion.  

I once used Wahl beard trimmer with a 1/8" guide, but that just couldn't withstand the sheer might of my facial hair.  Or, maybe it fell off the sink and broken into twenty-three pieces.  I'm not sure.  But now I use these off-brand hair clippers and a #1 guide.

Perhaps it's time for a change.  I don't shave because I'm lazy, but maybe I should change my style.  I could go with the Balbo, which is like the circle beard, only the mustache stays unconnected.  Then, with a more care than I'm used to providing, I could grow the Balbo into a Van Dyke, which is like a Balbo, only the goatee is pointed.

My family has a history with facial hair.  My grandfather has had a mustache since I can remember.  So do two of my four uncles.  For years, my brother had a ... well, I'm not quite sure what it was.  Imagine Billy Gibbons's beard.  Now, imagine it as a goatee.  That's what my brother had.  Until he shaved it for his wedding.

But my Dad has them all beat.  He looks like a Civil War veteran.  His muttonchops stick out so far he can run his hand through them, and he sports a horseshoe mustache bushier than that of the Walrus from Alice in Wonderland.  And he's had those chops and that stache for over thirty years.  I've seen pictures of him clean-shaven, but I wouldn't recognize him today if took a razor to his full face.

Perhaps I should shave it all off.  Just get rid of this gray and ginger beard that adorns my face so apparently sexy-like.

No, not gonna happen.  That's just crazy talk.

Brief Review: "And the Oscar Goes To..."

"And the Oscar Goes To..." is a documentary airing this month on TCM as a table setter for the channel's "31 Days of Oscar" celebration.  It's primarily a puff piece that bounces from topic to topic with a only a hint of a structure to it.  The narration by Anjelica Huston is scant, and the film is guided only slightly better by the talking heads, including stand-outs Benicio Del Toro, Phil Alden Robinson, and Jason Reitman.  

While the film only touches the surface on subjects that deserve longer exploration -- the Blacklist, racial injustice, an overall history of the award -- the segment on Oscar losers does stand out.  Ellen Burstyn explains how she felt about winning her Oscar and seeing Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence," "That's an Academy Award winning part.  She should have won an award for that role.  Not my award, though."  

The film shows interesting clips from the past that many film lovers have probably never seen, and I'm thankful for that.  Still, the Academy Awards may be better served receiving the Ken Burns treatment instead of a mere 90 minute documentary. 

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

I have an insatiable need to tell stories.

I write because I recognize writing is my greatest talent.  But writing is such a broad term that encompasses everything from journalism to poetry, from writing instruction manuals to writing radio spots, from writing short stories to epic novels.

I write stories because I'm power hungry.  I love taking my hand and reaching into a reader's soul to pinch at emotions he may have never thought possible.  Not from a story, anyway. 

I discovered this power existed on the floor of my college dorm room very early one May morning, with nothing but Jimmy Stewart standing on the floor of the Senate illuminating my face.  "You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked.  Well, I'm not licked!" he yelled, and it woke me up.

I'd seen "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" once before, and I liked it well enough.  It was the usual crowd-pleasing Capra-corn, and I thought nothing more of it before.  But I had to see it again.  It was on the list.

The AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Movies became public the summer before I started college, and I set a goal to watch every film on the list before I completed my first year.  And I did that.  All one hundred.  It became a way to cope with the loneliness of being one hundred eighty miles from home with no car and no friends at school. But as school year drew to a close, I needed a new goal.  Ownership, I thought.  I wanted to own all the movies.  Forever an escape.

The list hung tacked to my cork board, beside the Dilbert calendar and below the "A Clockwork Orange" poster.  It was a picture from the scene inside the milk bar near the beginning of the film.  Alex held his milk, and his eyes menaced the audience as he glared.  I lost the poster, but I always meant to hang it in my bathroom so I could literally scare the shit out of everyone who entered.  "A Clockwork Orange" was also on the list.

I could hear my physics book cry, "Open me!" from beneath the clutter of my overflowing desk.  I guess the microeconomics papers stifled its cries, because after one peep I heard no more.  And as much as it pained me to ignore my physics studies, as it pained me to ignore them every other night of that expiring semester, I had to watch the movie.

Two in the morning, Channel Four.  The local CBS affiliate for Champaign/Urbana, same as St. Louis.  "Mr. Smith" aired as part of the channel's "Late Night Cinema," so I set to record it.  I didn't plan on staying awake to watch it, but that's how it happened.  I leaned into my plaid reading pillow with a Dr. Pepper from the mini-fridge the television sat upon, careful not to spill it on the carpet Karl, my roommate kept neurotically clean, and watched my movie.

"You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked.  Well, I'm not licked!"  Those words always stick out in my mind.  An undisciplined student too smart for high school laid on that carpet.  I coasted through that year on the fact that I was a 4.5 student at one of the best schools in St. Louis and my failings so far in college was just a phase of adjustment.  I could dig myself out of this hole.  I was smart, a near genius, people told me.  You'll make a great engineer.  You're good at math, do something with that.  But I couldn't do anything.  The desire to learn had left, and in May, during finals week, I was stuck trying to dig myself out of a hole with a spoon while someone poured the dirt back in with a bulldozer.

"You think I'm licked.  You all think I'm licked."  Jimmy Stewart ruffles through those letters of lies Claude Rains brought into the Senate.  Jimmy pushes his exhausted face up to Jean Arthur in the press gallery, and then he turns to Claude and utters those remarkable words.  And at 5 AM, those words hit a nerve.  An ecstasy filled with goosebumps ran up my spine.  I felt something.  An epiphany.

My life changed in that moment.  Storytelling, not engineering, was my calling.  I felt the despair in Jimmy Stewart's voice.  It penetrated deep inside and clutched at my own feelings of loneliness and misery.  The movie ended and the credits rolled, and I sat on the floor dazed.  My deepest desire, one I didn't even know I had until that moment,  had been pulled from me and thrown at the wall so I could do nothing but stare at it.

I think of that moment every time I plan a new story.  It's my goal.  I want my readers to feel for my characters the same way I felt for Jimmy Stewart's Jeff Smith.  I want them to realize they aren't licked.

--mdu

Movies

The dimming quiets the buzz.  The laughter ceases and the murmurs hush; the stragglers linger off to the side craning their necks to find seats while survivors from the bathroom and concessions walk with the top halves of their bodies parallel to the floor so they won’t obstruct the view.  Though they will always be obstructing someone’s view.  The lights along the aisles fade as the front of the theater illuminates with anticipation.  The collective silence waits for one thing: the movie.

The previews.  The commercials.  The movie.  All explode from the back of the theater, from that white circle near the top of the wall, from the machine invented over a century ago and now delivering pictures world-wide.  The light escapes from the projector ever so slightly, and the beam gradually expands and dissipates over a crowd slouching in tall-backed cushy seats with buckets of fake-buttered popcorn and cups of sugar and caffeine in their armrests, unaware of the molecular miracles occurring above them.  That light hangs overhead collecting dust and dreams.  The dust sparkles in the light, but the dreams remain unseen.  Or the dreams are revealed.  Or they're forgotten.  Or they're realized.

The light shines over each patron, and it shines strongest over the middle.  It’s the brightest in the back, but it rests over the heads of horny teenagers more interested in what’s in each other’s pants than what’s on the screen; they have dreams, but they’re clouded by the overwhelming dust cloud interfering with those dreams.  The least interested in the movie, usually adults, sit in the dark corners of back where little light shines, whether they’re too horny to watch or too disinterested to find a better seat or too late to get a better seat.  The ones in the very front, the neck-breakers interested in the movie who’re either too late to the theater or too inexperienced in theater-going, feed off the light descending from the screen.  They’re only interested in the moment, what they see on the screen, who’s talking or who’s shooting or who’s dying.

It’s the ones in the middle that care the most, the people whose light above them shines with perfect clarity.  They dream the most and recognize the importance of the dreams of others.  Those dreams swim over their heads indifferent to dusty expectations of sex or food or drama or violence.  They seek loftier satisfaction: greatness, the same thing the dreamers who made the film seek.  The filmmakers instill their dreams onto the screen, and the people in the middle soak those dreams in and let the mingle with their own visions of greatness: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, the plot twists of Chinatown, the roar of the helicopters in Apocalypse Now, Robert DeNiro’s bloodied living carcass in Raging Bull, the final scenes of Casablanca.  Then, as the lights fade overhead and shine again along the aisles, as the eaters and drinkers pile into the bathroom, as the horny teens rush their cars for a hump, as the broken necks ask each other whether they liked the movie, the ones in the middle ponder whether the filmmakers’ dreams stood up to their own.  After all, they are the stuff movies are made of.

--mdu