Standing in Danny's Garage - A Brief Character Sketch

I stand in Danny's Garage, it's owned by this fellow with a red tinged quarter inch beard. The thumb of his weighty, cracked hand is confidently hooked into his already strained jeans. His flaccid belly is stretched taut with a woodland camo shirt and is indented where his right thumb fits in. Beer he bought cheaper than "that bottled water" is in the left hand, crusty and torn jeans sag at the crotch pulling the eye down to scuffed steal toed boots that used to be dark shiny brown and are matte tan now. He stands hips jutted forward, hair in slick dark blond clumps strings out from under a day-glow orange hat, gathering into a mullet that looks like it was shot and applied to to back of his head in the 80's and has been decaying ever since. His shoulders are collapsed forward because he's relaxed, in his domain. He's the king of chaos and stuck to 2"x4" studs he has a harem of naked women torn from tawdry magazines, all inflamed for his desire. (Don't judge, greasy guys need love at their command too.)

He's standing in his garage where he does dubious shade tree mechanicing. He loves Fords cause his daddy loved them and they ain't no foreign junk and that's all he needs to know, ever, period, don't bring it up again. Snap-On sockets, the only thing of quality to be seen, are hanging out of the open drawers of his red, 5'4" tool box (I know because I stand by it). Black, limp rags hang from the corner and are piled all over a darkly stained cool gray floors, scattered with clay cat litter that scuffs when I move. Old cylinders of various welding gases stand in a corner, not sure what color they started life as but the scratches showing different layers of paint and ending in rust. Cars are in various stages of being repaired or torn apart. Parts from all the cars mingle like it's a cocktail party and they're hell bent on going home with a different car then they came with.

I've stood here before, not at these exact coordinates, but I've been here assessing the general view of the area. I've stood here doing the complex math required to extrapolate what it means about the people who own and work in the place and what it's going to cost me to leave with a car that runs and drives.

- This is simply a character sketch I want to save for a future story, our cars are fine. My mechanic is far classier and better looking than the quality one described. :) My thanks goes to S for the business name.

The Greatest Summer

Remember all the things I was going to do this summer? It was a short list but had two things in it I'd never done and wanted to do, try to do photography professionally and publish one short story.  Perhaps you'd like to know how it's gone? I was so gung ho and shared it with you guys to hold me to it. 

I didn't. I didn't even start down that road. Instead I have two jobs, one redoing a website for the NCSU Biology department and another playing super girl who can do everything and replace anyone in the front office of a Dermatologist's office. Far cry from what I wanted isn't it?  Life happened as it often happens to us, fast. What I needed to do for the summer changed three weeks into it based on decisions that I did not control. It's a long story...

I have a friend, he likes to say that planning is like peeing into the ocean. He's right. Life is less about always achieving my goals and more about making them and then practicing holding them lightly, not grasping them so tightly that I go down with them when they're lost at sea. And as I watched those plans be swept away this summer I eventually smiled as they disappeared because there is always tomorrow. Tomorrow will be full of new plans, new goals and new challenges. The sea that I am continually challenging will flow around me and through me making me the a woman of greater insight, compassion and perspective.

 

Truthfully, I love the Biology job. My boss is a brilliant woman, a neuroscientist, and I enjoy chatting with her talking about big plans for the department and for the website. I'm directing the automation of the site to keep it's updating painless and later I will tweak its layout and give the pages better focus. It's something I'm very good at and it's nice to be the expert sometimes.

The dermatologist job is teaching me how a Dr's office is run. The daily grind of keeping one alive and well. This is an amazing opportunity if I should ever decide to run my own someday. 

Currently...

...I'm trying to write secondaries. Secondaries are the second application that all medical schools require you to fill out. Most have 3-5 essays they want you two write, no two the same. I have come down with a viral case of writer's block and each paragraph is a physical fight. I fish words from my brain like I fish broken bits of eggshells from my eggs in the morning. It each word is an elusive hunt often not meshing with the one before. It will get done... once I'm done writing this. 

...my father-in-law lays dying, his tubes disconnected, life flowing from his body. Life is short and it's not worth getting too spun up about.

After running around Lake Lynn this morning I stopped by the grocery store and heard this song. It reminded me of my plans this summer of all the plans I've made over the years and failed at completing, plans that I may never get to complete... It's all about perspective...

The Greatest 

by Kenny Rogers

...He makes no excuses, He shows no fears
He just closes his eyes and listens to the cheers

Little boy, he adjusts his hat
Picks up his ball, stares at his bat
Says I am the greatest the game is on the line
And he gives his all one last time

And the ball goes up like the moon so bright
Swings his bat with all his might
And the world's so still as still can be
And the baseball falls, and that's strike three

Now it's supper time and his mama calls
Little boy starts home with his bat and ball
Says I am the greatest that is a fact
But even I didn't know I could pitch like that.

To the Unknown

Tested this morning and I am now a certified General Class HAM. YEOW!!! YIPPEEE! *JUMPING* One goal for the summer down and a couple more to go  and those may not get accomplished. But more on that later.

Just as important, I finished the dreaded personal statement last night and I can now apply to medical school. Once I push that button the future is shot into the unknown and it's out of my hands. I don't particularly like that part of it. I'm more comfortable when there's something left for me to do, to control and to perfect. It's good for me, pushes me to be still and exercises my character. Jumping into activity isn't scary for me, jumping into stillness, into waiting, terrifies me.

So I'm looking over the edge and about to let go... wish me luck.

The Business of Being Alive

 My expectations are fairly low regarding the mountains of the east and Smokey Mountain National Park did little to raise them. It's still early in the high country, not many leaves or flowers and the pinnacle of a few thousand feet the views were brown. Not horrible, it's hard to imagine being out in the woods and it being horrible ever.  Every place, like nearly every human, has something to appreciate. Something wise to bestow on the person who sits for a short minute of contemplation at its heart.

Dry Falls

On down to Transylvania County.  That's the place to go. Waterfalls that sent sound waves to beat your backbone, roar down gaps in sheer mossy cliffs. Forests that pulled in the mist like a breathy hint of lace and little towns with sweaty, bearded men driving trucks piled with rakes and shoves as well as alabaster skinned men in button down shirts, Italian leather and cars. I saw few women.

Out the Window

Little restaurants could be found, covered in ivy, surrounded by green ponds, lit by candle and owned by people who came looking to run away from the life they had built for themselves and never went back. Gregarious entrepreneurs with more life experience than most have in 100 years and a penchant for kissing the women that visit their place.

Horacio's

Antique shops with brand new merchandise shyly beckon  from nearly every stomach lurching corner. I started to count and then gave up wondering how many people it took to keep these havens of commerce thriving in a place that looks like you leave on vacation and come back to find your shop entombed with vines, centipedes and trees.

Unlike the arid peaks of the west the rain forest of the east crawls and hums with six, eight or hundred legged life all going somewhere and eating something.  On the way back from a warm shower with a tiny button in the wall that you pumped ferociously to get 3 minutes of pressure, I found a centipede with a fringe of tiny yellow legs. These legs moved in a sinusoidal pattern from back to front. All the legs bunched together in one spot as it tickled along the ground and this bunched up spot flowed up its body in a perfect sin wave pattern.  Beautiful in a squirmy sort of way. 

I found direction there.  Purpose for the summer anyway. Another summer of no money. A summer of rice, beans, Ramen Noodles and dreams.  But dreams to chase that I'll never get to chase for years if I don't do it now.  Someday I need to get a real job. Something that will take my soul from 9-5 and give me a decent living in return, but it appears that won't be this summer. I have settled on trying to sell at least three of my stories and perhaps write more to send out.

Lower priority but still a priority is to put my name out to do portrait photography and see what comes to me. Why not? Like the Italian in the little ivy covered restaurant pointed out. You try and if you fail you get down, do two push ups and move on.  I like that. It's true. I have to try.  I may fail but I'll never know if I don't hurtle myself down mountainside taking the challenges as they came.  I prefer landscape/nature photography but why not try, I have the skill and a good camera and I can always stop when I tire of it.

At the top of a mountain one can prepare, mitigate risk, visualize success and enjoy the view but life isn't lived at the top. It's lived either climbing up or hurtling down.  If I try to stay at the top it loses it's ecstasy. The view is made sweeter by the sweat, the agony and the sensuous experience of being physically and mentally engaged in the business of being alive.

- To Shel...

My Meditation

Running, meditation.
The focus narrows,
The sensation of effort,
Sweat tickling down skin,
Music overwhelms thoughts
And each breath a prayer moving with the rhythm of being alive.

Global Environmental Politics

Link to GEP paper.


Here is a link to the paper I wrote. Again, try not to judge it too harshly since I struggled with the format the teacher wanted. It was very unnatural for me to write and I ended up pushing through it over night. It is probably one of the most difficult papers I have written because of this. The subject itself was fascinating and the data was fun to pull together. Ok I'm done defending myself. :D Enjoy...

The Pop-riveted Wonder

It was green, wasn't it? Last time I saw it, green was the predominant color. A dark, dusty green, with small cracks where the sun had been able to get through the shiny gloss that enticed the original owner. The cracks ran down to a peachy spot that was sandy and dull and picked up on the other side where they branched out to a burgundy burst of rattle can paint. Then they dove on down to where it suddenly stopped short in the mottled silver of tin that took up where the crack had left off. A rivet seam sewed the tin to the fractured green.

Each tin patch gave way to another tin patch, their rivets lined up in precise rows until the tin gave way to a cancerous lesion's lacy edge. The rust that threatened to end the life of the venerable machine, eating it in pieces and leaving it in the Upper Michigan driveway to nourish life with its oxidized iron.

Sometimes Dad, a tall imposing man whose gigantic hands were the terror of every naughty boy in Sabbath School, would wind up its motor and charge the feisty steed shooting gravel from under balding tires down the driveway toward the growing pothole that marked the quarter mile point. As my brother, Eric, and I, bent toward the space between the two front seats our blond heads nearly colliding in the center with each lurch. Our eyes were pinned wide open with the g-forces and we leaned forward with the thrill that 35 miles per hour on a gravel road can give two grade schoolers.

Then we would hit the dip, our seats dropped out from under us, our heads rapped the seat in front. We would be suspended for just a second at the apex of our bounce and then we would be falling down while the seat came up impacting our bums with the force of a resounding spank. Our high voices would cheer. The sharp smell of the dust that had hovered above its resting spot, the lightly grooved plastic mats, was pulled into our noses as we inhaled sharply. Dad cheered too, I think, but it sounded kind of like, "it should make it to school and back." The struts were rusted so badly he feared they would give out and the sporty hatch-backed car would strand us on a lonely country lane while doing the permanent splits with its tires.

Normal places people don't have to worry about breaking their struts on the way to school, even if they are rusting. But Upper Michigan was hit hard by the slump of the 80's and it was rumored that our town had written the head of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to stock our potholes so all the non-vegetarians could all have fish to eat. We vegetarians were happy too, that meant more food for us since everyone else would be eating their Rainbow Trout, Sucker or Coho Salmon. Maybe, the hardy locals whispered, they would even stock a few Smelt for those prone to biting the head off of the little fish in the ecstasy of successful fishing.

This fish head biting was a local tradition. My 10 year old male classmates would puff out their scrawny plaid, flannel covered chests and recount their latest experience of this tradition hoping to make the small female population at our school scream. Most of the girls did scream, their stiffly sprayed bank of upright bangs quivering in their horror. The DNR never did honor the request and it seems that the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) - busily making life better under the bridge, never came to patch the holes. And so my dad continued to try to break the car in the driveway where we could get home easily.

I didn't like the car. In spite of the joy of the daily NASCAR like drive down to the looming pothole in the driveway it was beneath my 10 year old permed and hair sprayed dignity. Thinking back, it was the 80's, everything was ugly and there were very few new cars on the road but somehow I knew I rode in the ugliest car in the nation. This was my third school since I started five years ago and since it was populated with cousins and people of the North that had dug in for years, as a newcomer I did not feel welcome. Simply put, I was really not cool. Life was a tragedy and that was compounded by the green patch worked Datsun that got us to school.

As Dad drove, I would sink down in my back seat, well under the little triangle of glass that was my window. When we arrived to our orange and white vertically striped, tin sided school, Dad pulled the grayed green emergency break until it clicked out to its last setting and hopped out the "pop" the seat. I would scramble out careful not to catch my tightly pegged jeans on the car and hoped that no one, in the twenty kid classroom would see me out the plate glass windows.

Even then I had to admit it added brightness to my life. Eric and I with our heads down resting on our knees would amuse ourselves by pealing up the aforementioned rubbery black floor mats and peer at the pavement streaking by. The different colored rocks that made up the gray concrete would speed by making faint streaks of color under the car. We would whisper in conspiratorial tones about what we would do if we were kidnapped in the Datsun. At 10 and 7 we had it all planned out. We kept an arsenal of driveway gravel on the floor near our seats. IF someone were foolish enough to steal the Hornbacher children we would quickly pull up the mats to the secret holes in the floor and drop out the little rocks.  A Hansel and Gretel trail of gravel. It was infallible.

But the best story happened when the Mother-in-law or Coco as we all called her, came up to visit.

To be continued...