Hello everyone!

I decided to bring this blog back. It’s been about 7-8 years, and I’ve developed quite a few ideas over that timeframe. Hopefully this place will give me the opportunity to express some of them.

More to come!

-j

**A narrator keeps giving his protagonist the perfect opportunities to make his life into a great story, but the protagonist keeps messing it up. The narrator is slowly getting desperate.   **

Author Note: I wrote this in less than an hour after hearing the prompt in an attempt to try writing more “extemporaneously”. It was an extremely grueling endeavor, but something I’ll try again.

I said, “She smiled. As she passed, Jake nervously walked up to the woman and blocked her path. She stopped. She was wearing a violet button up blouse. She shifted, revealing a slender figure accentuated by a black skirt.” I leaned in, metaphorically. He needs more. “He felt a sudden pressure at his side. He looked down. A small, beige purse with a lettered pattern was under his arm. Confused, he looked up at the woman and begin to speak, ‘Hello …’. He hesitated. The woman looked at him. He could see the increased agitation on her face. She looked under his shoulder and then at her waist. Her agitation turned to anger. She snatched the purse from under his arm and smacked him with it, before cursing and walking away.” I sat back, exasperated. I thought for sure that would work. “Jake stood for several seconds before running toward a nearby awning.”

“Rita regains consciousness after a motorcycle accident. She has received skin grafts covered in tattoos from an anonymous organ donor. The tattoos provide Rita with clues to the donor’s dark proclivities.”

“He’s going to kill you,” a voice said. The car stank. Knowing a chain-smoker guarantees an intimacy with futility and death. It’s not always the cigarettes that kill them, though.

“You were always my friend,” the driver replied. His hands rubbed back and forth on a small tin container. The metal was old and the printing faded. He stopped, then turned his hands to lay them on the box. Upturned wrists exposed two identical, yet aged tattoos. After taking a deep breath, he opened the box and stroked the photo behind the mess of trinkets and knick-knacks. **

He felt a brisk wind on his cheek as he stared into rolling grasslands. The world was an empty place. He suppressed his confusion as he held out his right hand to reveal a bloodied axe. A beating drum entered his awareness. As it increased in volume he turned to see its approach behind him. Time slowed down. He struggled to look, but something resisted his movement. His anxiety howled as the beating drum grew louder and finally became deafening. Just as he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, all became black.

“Hmm,” the mischievous man said as he lifted the brick to his face to inspect the quality. Like all other fired clay bricks, it was red and sturdy. Except this one was different. He had added a little something extra to its edge before baking it. The man spent a few more seconds examining the brick, perhaps to wonder about the small chip at the side, before placing it in the wagon. The day was sunny and bright. The men quickly laid layer after layer. When one of the men got to Chip, he stared at it for a second before giving a wide grin and heavily laying it in the next spot.

The pinky is emotion. It is a dream. It is a white’s white, a blue’s blue, and a black’s black. It is a train traveling a rail that cannot be seen. It is a ringing anthem to explore the rough texture that hides behind our smooth skin. It always seems like a painting made up of a thousand kernels of sand with an improbable placement.

The ring finger is commitment. It rings of the hymns sung from every church on Sunday. It is a large sky with complex clouds as far as the eye can see, but it is also a giant ocean of which only I am entrusted the charts. It is glass willingly shattered that will never again be whole. It is a song that must be written over and over.

I saw Beauty and the Beast last night, and it moved me more than I expected. It wasn’t the cinematography, the beautifully decorated sets, Emma Watson, or the hopeful story of love that did it for me. If I’d seen the same movie six months ago, I’d still have felt something, but nothing quite as beautiful as what I felt for an entire hour after seeing this movie. I was so inspired that I came home and immediately wrote the outline to this blog post. I felt this warm, beautiful glow in my chest. A peaceful feeling, like the one you feel right before you easily fall asleep after a particularly rewarding and exhausting day’s work. I’ve changed, somehow. The past several months have probably been the most emotionally engaged of my life. Both my brother and sister have noticed it in their own ways and told me as much. But how did it happen?

Emotional writing is different from intellectual writing. As I’ve moved forward in life, I’ve come to acknowledge a fundamental flaw in my writing ability. It’s been there, masked in the imperceptible shadow of my psyche, for at least a decade. This hidden part of myself reared its head as if born from a button I felt compelled to press as the critical clock of my life spun toward midnight. The only regret I have is that I wish I could have done it sooner. I continue to feel tortured by the unbidden consequences of this action, but I would do it over and over again if it could mean that I would feel complete someday. What it has given me is the realization that emotional writing is only effective if the reader emphasizes with a character’s feelings or situation.

I have managed to avoid being high my entire life. I’ve never even been buzzed. Why would I subject myself to this? I’m obviously insane. When I was younger, I typically did what my parents told me to do if I found it rational. “You shouldn’t drink or smoke,” they said. “Okay!” I said back. And that was that for decades. Little did they expect (and much to their dismay), I kept that habit through college and into my professional life. When people asked me why, I typically said it was for health reasons. At my age and with that excuse, I start to wonder if people think I used to be an alcoholic. “Cranberry juice, please!” When I got my wisdom teeth out, they put me on Vicodin. I called my father and asked when I would start to feel high. His response? “Do you feel any pain?” And of course I responded, “No.” He cheekily replied: “Then you’re high!” Nowadays, I like to tell people that I want to experience the world in its entirety, pain and all. Those discomforting signals, I tell them, let you know that you’re dissatisfied with the world and that you need to make a change. Drinking, in my view, was a self-applied control mechanism to make you docile.

I’ve always struggled with the question of which I’d rather do in my career: would I like to always write new code, or am I happy fixing and extending older code (aka maintenance)? Some people may say it’s never that black and white, “Projects usually have sprinklings of both!”. In my career, though, it has typically followed that trend. So what makes the dichotomy between “writing new code” and “maintaining old” so important in my life as a software engineer, and why am I writing about this?