Thoughts with Nowhere Else to Go

Music to My Ears

2012-02-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

"Al Riske has packed so much emotional punch in this 217-page slice-of-life novel [Sabrina's Window] that I'm still thinking about the people that inhabit the pages ... Reading it was much like hearing a piece of music. I know I'll read it again, and re-discover the nuances of something beautiful."
- Katherine Adams, Goodreads

Thanks, Katherine!

First review of Sabrina's Window

2012-01-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

Skipping to the part I like best ...

"Sabrina's Window is a pure pleasure to read. Al Riske does an excellent job of creating colorful, realistic characters. The story is brought to life while the author blends the story into the beautiful Taos scenery. Doing so gives the novel a very unique flavor and I highly recommend it."
- Paige Lovitt, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

You can read the full review here. It's quite insightful, actually.

Antiphony

2011-12-10T10:25:00.001-08:00

Antiphony is, in many ways, an awe-inspiring novel. It was, I think, written in awe. Awe of science and reason. Awe of intuition and faith. Awe of the one and the many, unity and diversity.

Writer Chris Katsaropoulos has a way of delving deeply into what seem like small moments–the whole novel takes place in just three or four days–and capturing all their nuances and vibrating tension.

Throughout Antiphony, the protagonist (a physicist researching string theory) experiences dreams and visions that fill pages the way a flash flood fills a ravine–a torrent of words flowing into the space between the margins and pressing onward to the next page and the next.

It makes me wonder how he did it.

Christmas, remembered

2011-12-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

This is me and my big brother, Harry, with our mom behind us and our sisters all around.

This is how he once was and always wanted to be.

In the years since Harry's death I've come to realize just how hard he tried to keep alive the boy inside.

He was a Scout Master and skateboard maestro to the end.

God hug you, my brother. I'm grateful for everything you taught me.

(The stuffed animals are from our bigger brother, Rudi, who's probably the one taking the picture. I'm grateful to you, too, Rudi, for a Christmas to remember and so much more.)

The Fear Factor

2011-09-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

Dick Cheney has a memoir. We have an anthology. Here's a little sample of what you'll find in D*cked:

My name is Dick and I'm afraid all the time.

I can't stop worrying.

I worry so much I think I might explode.

I worry about America losing its power. I worry about those oil-rich nomads giving this country a giant wedgie the way the cool kids in high school did to me back in the day.

Back when I was a nerd and not the leader of the free world.

Well, de facto leader.

You think W was ever in charge? Fuck you.

Now I'm an ex, but not a has-been. Not if I have anything to say about it. And I do. I still got plenty to say.

I talk when I get nervous. Always have. And right now I'm terrified.

They don't understand what's about to happen.

And it won't be my fault. They will have only themselves to blame ...

I hear those late-night comics making fun of the way I talk, making me sound like the Penguin in the old Batman TV show. Well, that was a great show, and if you don't think so, you must be some kind of elitist snob, so shove it.

They think they're so cool. They think they can give me a virtual wedgie and just walk away—laugh all the way to the bank. I got news for them. Nobody but nobody pulls my underpants up my crack. Not anymore they don't. Virtual or otherwise.

They're the ones. Oh, yeah. They're the ones who need to live in fear.

Live in fear like I do. Like I always have. Always having to look over my shoulder.

I cannot be held responsible, I'm telling you now.

Tell them! Tell them for me that they'd better be on the alert whenever they bend over. I get one glimpse of Jockey white, one glimpse of BVD elastic, and I'm doing it, Doc.

They've pushed me too far this time.

Do any of those we-don't-torture softies ever worry, like I do, that there is going to be a whole series of attacks all across this land? Do they really think they can choose NOT to live in fear? Ha!

The new Veep thinks he's got the terrorists on the run, thinks he's reduced the threat of attack. He hasn't. He just increased it. And Jon "smarty pants" Stewart with his Daily Show saying my pronouncements have never been right—about anything. What a wiseacre. Always playing clips of me making predictions that haven't come true. Well, I know I'm right this time.

I know I'm right, because I will attack. I will go nuclear.

Oh, yeah! You'd better believe it, Doc. I will go nuclear on their asses.

Atomic wedgies all around!

Then we'll see how they like it.

I'm not kidding. This is war!

Jesus for President

2011-08-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

What would Jesus say if he were running for office?

Silly question, I know. Jesus would never run for office.

Remember how people tried to get him into a debate about taxes? He wouldn't let himself be sucked in.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," he said, "and render unto God the things that are God's."

In other words, Jesus had other priorities, higher priorities.

I think he understood that religion and politics don't mix.

Religion is supposed to be pure; politics is, at best, messy, pragmatic, and full of compromises.

That's how it works.

I'm really, really tired of candidates who call themselves Christians yet bear no resemblance to the man they are supposed to be emulating.

They don't share his compassion or his humility, much less his priorities.

Santa Margherita, September 2002

2011-07-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

We awoke in darkness.
Not a sliver of light anywhere.
Eyes open, pure black.
There was just the sound of the rain and a light wind,
water from the roof splattering on the stone terrace
outside the glass doors of our Villa Gnocchi bedroom.
Then, boom!
Thunder like we'd never heard before.
Thunder loud enough to make our bodies twitch
and our eyes pop open.
The rain came louder, too, followed by more thunder.
Again, and again, and again.
Then flashes of lightening.
At first I was able to count to nine
between lightning flash
and thunder clap.
Then zero.
Joanne's body tensed in my arms.
Finally the storm subsided.
Did it really last for hours?
I lay awake wondering when the dawn would come.
Eventually a little light peeked through the curtains.
It was our first time
in Italy.

Feeling Lucky

2011-06-06T15:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a book I highly recommend: I'm Feeling Lucky, by Doug Edwards.

Billed as "The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59," the book is insightful and inspiring and down to earth all at once.

It's fun to see how the author, an old-school marketing pro, juggled pride and humility during his tenure with a company that tended to ignore conventional wisdom.

I felt like I was right there with him.

His blog, Xooglers, is also a riot.

The Teacher

2011-05-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

My name is Bodie. I’m a shih-tzu poodle. That’s the first thing everyone wants to know. Not sure what difference it makes.

Oh, and I’m four now. That’s the other thing everyone asks about.

As far back as I can remember, Al and Joanne have always been with me. They say they adopted me, though, from a nice woman Joanne used to work for.

I heard them talking once and Al admitted he had wanted a bigger dog (which is probably why I've always preferred Joanne), but I won him over. That's what he said: I won him over. And I wasn't even trying, you know. I was just being me. Being Bodie.

My best quality? Bodie's a good boy. Just ask Al. He's always saying, "Who's a good boy? Bodie is! Bodie's a good boy!" Just like that, a dozen times a day.

I was named after a famous skier, Bode Miller, but spelled different so people can pronounce it better. I guess I was pretty laid back as a pup, nursing while lying on my back and stuff like that. They also call me the Boy, the Dude, the Little Lebowski, the Bodester, Bodhisattva … It’s all cool.

I won't lie to you, man. I like to snuggle. Yeah, you heard me. Snuggle. So what? I can run and bark with the best of them, and I'm not afraid of anybody, but pick me up and hold me — I love that!

I’m not into the whole top dog thing, which is probably a good thing since I only weigh about seven pounds. But lots of big dogs don’t really care either. They just want to have a good time, just like me. The ones that do care? They’re just mean, so stay away from them. They’re no fun at all. Maybe they were mistreated, I don’t know. I’m sorry if they were, but I’m not a threat to anyone, so give me a break! Life is short and you should try to enjoy it as much as you can as often as you can. Know what I’m saying?

One thing I really enjoy is, every morning, I get a big breakfast biscuit — I love the taste of bacon, cheese, and eggs all in one biscuit. You should try it.

In the evening we go for walks. Me and my pack. The three of us — me and Al and Joanne — like to roam the neighborhood. Usually it’s me in the lead. I’ll go anywhere, man. Preferably someplace new — that really gets me going, you know? — but I still like the old routes, too. Like to say hi to my old friends.

Later, if I’m feeling frisky, well, there's this stuffed bear at home ... I know it's not real, and yet I see that thing sometimes and I just ... I get excited, you know? I’m not embarrassed to admit it. I'm a dog. We do what comes naturally. It's all good.

Seriously, though, there's just one thing I really care about. My number one goal in life is to look after Al and Joanne, alert them to danger, warn away intruders, and just, you know, be there for them. You want to do it right, you got to pay attention. Be at the door when they come home. Let them know you missed them and were thinking about them.

You pay attention and you’ll know when they need you to comfort them.

It’s not hard. Just be present.

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.

2011-04-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., by Sam Wasson, is a little book with a lot to say.

The title tells you where and when shooting began on a silly-yet-pivital romantic comedy — the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany's — and the book proceeds to put the whole production into the context of its time.

Think late-fifties, early sixties. The world was different then. I had forgotten how different.

What really interested me, though, was seeing how a story can be reimagined, and why this one had to be.

First of all, if you've never read Breakfast at Tiffany's, do it now. Go ahead. Go. The rest of this can wait and I don't want to spoil anything for you ...

It's stunning, don't you think, just how good Capote's comic tragedy really is. I just read it again and was astonished once more by how much feeling he was able to pack in so few pages.

But the novella — even though it provides most of the dialogue in the film and shows more than it tells — was not well suited for the screen. Not at the time.

In Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., we learn that screenwriter George Axelrod struggled with the adaptation and nearly despaired. This wasn't the typical Hollywood romance where Rock Hudson tries to bed Doris Day and she holds him off until they're married.

The central character, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn in the movie) is a Manhatten partygirl living off the largesse of rich old men. Virginity isn't an issue.

That was good because, we're told, Axelrod had been itching to do a truly adult comedy. It was bad because he had the Motion Picture Production Code to worry about.

I watched the movie again last night and, while far from perfect, it is fascinating in its own right. Holly comes across as innocent compared to Paul, the male lead, who Axelrod reimagined as not just a struggling writer (as in the book) but one who prostitutes himself to a rich, older, married woman who leaves cash on the dresser when she leaves in the morning.

That was OK with Holly and with the censors and it all ends happily.

What I'd really like to see is a remake by the Coen Brothers.

Sabrina's Window

2011-03-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

The boy who broke Sabrina's window stood on the stoop, shivering. This early in the morning it was still chilly here in the high desert, but he seemed scared, too—like he couldn't imagine anything worse than being right where he was, having done what he did.

Those are the opening lines of my novel, Sabrina's Window, which will make its debut in February.

The contract with my publisher, Luminis Books, has been signed and executed, and what makes it all the more real is that I've already seen numerous potential cover designs by the brilliant artist/photographer who did the cover of my story collection.

That would be none other than Joanne Riske.

Quite a coincidence that we share the same last name, eh?

Reader, Interupted

2011-02-04T16:15:00.000-08:00

I recently had the opportunity to read one of my stories, "Skittish," as part of the Peninsula Literary Series.

I was especially glad to be asked because the first time I read the story out loud, in the basement of a small bar in San Francisco, it was a disaster. Live band upstairs. No microphone downstairs.

This would be different. This would be in a quiet art gallery in Palo Alto. Nothing to it.

But noooo ...

I was interupted, time and again, by someone with a dry hacking cough—a cough that kept getting worse.

I swear I could barely get through three paragraphs before it would start up again ...

HACK! HACK!

The fact that the person coughing was me only made matters worse.

What Are You Working On?

2011-01-07T15:45:00.000-08:00

Consider, for a moment, the importance of precision: How an exact measurement defines our progress. How it sets the new standard.

Even something as elemental as a footrace may come down to a photo finish—a thousandth of a second separating the fastest runner from the also-rans.

The naked eye isn’t enough. Not in sports, and certainly not in science.

In science, technology, and the businesses built around them, the difference between success and failure is measured in microns, milliseconds and parts per trillion.

Measurement has the power to change our understanding of the world. It tells us what’s possible now and inspires us to reach even farther.

I say all that because I happen to work for the world's premiere measurement company. We have a lot of brilliant scientists here doing things that, frankly, I can barely comprehend. I just know they're helping make the world a better place.

Recently I had the pleasure of writing about one of our research fellows, Curt Flory.

Curt is not only brilliant, he's funny and self-effacing.

"I compulsively have to know how things work," he told me. "In fact, my wife often needles me and says, 'You can’t be happy just using something. You have to know where all the electrons are going.'"

Among his achievements: Curt helped develop the cesium beam atomic frequency standard—the basis of the most precise commercial timekeeping device in the world and probably one of the most accurate pieces of instrumentation of any kind

How accurate? In a million years, such a clock would lose maybe one second, if it could run that long without exhausting its supply of cesium. So who needs that kind of precision? Try everyone who depends on the satellite-based Global Positioning System, or GPS, to figure out where they are or where they’re going.

"The thing GPS is measuring is the flight time of light, or electromagnetic radiation, and that travels really fast. So let’s imagine you’re off by a microsecond—one millionth of a second. In that time, light has traveled 300 meters. You want to be more accurate than that," he said. "So that’s a pervasive example of why timing, time synchronization, time intervals, frequency stability—all of those things—are so important."

Of course, that was some time ago. What's he working on now? I can't tell you that, but I can tell what typically happens when his wife asks the same question.

"If my wife is having trouble sleeping," Curt told me, "she’ll roll over and say, 'So what are you working on now?' Every time, I fall for it. I always think, 'She’s finally really interested.' So I start talking about it, getting all excited, and within two minutes, I hear: 'Zzzzz.' Now I’m wide awake and I have to get up and start jotting things down."

Story Behind the Story: "Men Are Such Boys"

2010-12-02T14:24:00.000-08:00

This one is a story about an older woman dating a younger man. "Men Are Such Boys" was written before the term cougar became popular, and I don't think of the woman, Deirdre, as a cougar, which has taken on a derogatory connotation.

This is simply a story about a woman who thinks of all men as boys. Boys in bigger bodies.

In the first few drafts, I cut back and forth between Deirdre's point of view and that of the young man, Randy.

I was quite fond of the story then, but it wasn't getting the response I wanted from readers. Nobody really liked it, and I didn't know why.

I needed to do something, but what?

Then, I don't know why, I decided to present almost the entire story from Deirdre's point of view, then again from Randy's, finally bringing the two viewpoints together for the ending.

That did the trick.

Readers started saying it was my best story yet.

As I told the astute interviewer from Book Club Queen (who got me thinking about this story), I believe it's because you get more uninterrupted time with each character, enough time to bond. And you naturally buy into the first point of view before finding out there's more to the story. That change in perception makes it more interesting, I think.

The End Is Here

2010-11-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a Baptist church and was born again at an early age.

When I was in high school there was a lot of talk of "the end time," and there would be again in coming years. (Then, it was spurred by a book called The Late Great Planet Earth; I don't know what spurred it later on.)

I grew up hearing about Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Their scandals were an embarrassment. So were the pronouncements of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

These people did not speak for me.

That was the end time for me.

It was a time when ministers asked their congregations to write letters to Congress — letters decrying legislation that, as it turns out, had never been written or proposed.

My minister. My congregation.

Some said the peace sign was actually satanic, as if peace were a bad thing. (I kid you not; I heard that in church.) There was even a period when kids like me were encouraged to use a different sign — to point an index finger to heaven indicating "One way."

It never really caught on.

I remember arguing with classmates that organized religion could be still be salvaged. There were still good people doing good things, after all. And there still are.

I studied religion in college and had professors who were good and wise examples. They helped me hold on to my faith awhile longer.

But I no longer believe there is one way (and haven't for a long time). One way is a mistake with disasterous consequences.

One way is wedded to intolerance and gives birth to tyranny.

I'm so done with that.

Composed

2010-10-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

Rosanne Cash is a brilliant singer/songwriter. I say that even though I'm not really a fan of country music.

Her album The Wheel is one of my all-time favorites, in any genre, so I picked up her memoir, Composed, to learn more.

It's a good book and well-written, but it seems to skim along the surface much of the time. Unlike her songs. Her songs take you so deep you think you might drown.

The Precarious Writing Process

2010-10-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

For the most part, the writing process remains a mystery to me, even though I've been doing this for a long time now. My first story was published when I was 10 years old. On a mimeograph machine. By my fourth-grade teacher. (Everyone in the class got a copy, and I signed each one.) I've written a lot of stories since then, including the fifteen in Precarious, but the process is never the same.

That first story was in response to an assignment: Write a story about anything you like. I wrote about a baseball game with an unlikely ending. (I had cast my two best friends as the captains of opposing teams and couldn't decide which should win, so I had an escaped elephant interrupt the proceedings.)

Much later, when I started to get serious about writing, stories came to me in different ways. I didn't have to write them, and yet I did. Looking back, it seems almost as if I had no choice. The ideas never came easily to me. Well, never and always. I couldn't turn out a story at will. I couldn't just decide to write one. But then a story, or the beginnings of a story, would suddenly take shape in my mind. It was easy if I wasn't trying. The story might be inspired by a photograph in a magazine, a song on the radio, a snippet of conversation overhead at lunch. Or it could come, seemingly out of nowhere, in the form of a first sentence.

I almost never know where I’m going with a story. In fact, most of the time, I’m not even conscious of why I’m writing it, unless it's simply to find out what will happen. Invariably I get stuck and don't know. Have no clue. Can't figure it out. The remedy is usually a long walk, a hot bath, or a good night's sleep. In extreme cases I've been forced to leave a story half finished for years, as was the case with both "Taken," which was inspired by a photograph, and "Dance Naked," which was inspired by a true story.

The phrase “inspired by a true story” should always be regarded with suspicion because you never know how much is true. Very little, in this case. But years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I had the chance to cover a murder trial and that’s where I got the idea for “Dance Naked” — two guys fighting over one woman and how ugly that can get. But it’s a much different story than the one I covered. I made up 99.9% of it. And it doesn’t end the way I thought it would.

In some ways, I think, my process is probably similar to what an actor goes through to get into character, drawing upon his own memories and emotions in order to empathize with the person he's portraying—only I get to play all the parts: The hero, the villain, the man, the woman, the faithful friend. On the page, I get to act out lives unlike my own. Not that I consciously think of it as acting. My process is largely unconscious, and a lot of my best stuff comes to me as I'm waking up in the morning, as if from a dream. It's just there and I don't know where it came from.

Originally posted on TSP.

Our Time in the Mediteranean

2010-09-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

Here's what I liked best ...

Spaghetti with clams at Ristorante da Donato, around the corner from our hotel in Rome.
Seeing Trevi Fountain again, the Spanish Steps, and a bit of the Borghese Gardens.
The rooftop bar of the Albergo del Senato, where we stayed, on the same square as the Pantheon.
Being able to walk everywhere from there—the Coliseum, the Forum, St. Peter's.
Ordering iced tea and being asked if I want peach tea, because, yes, in fact, I do.
Dark chocolate gelato from Giolitti.
Death by Chocolate at Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona.
Coming into Genoa by ship and seeing the city from the water.
Lying flat on our backs on the ship's helipad late at night, seeing the true brightness of the stars, and understanding how the Milky Way got its name.
Gnocchi with pesto at Ristorante il Pozzo in Monterosso on the Cinque Terre (part of the coastal region known as Liguria, where pesto was invented).
Anchoring offshore in Villafranche and taking the little ferry into town.
The turquoise water in nearby Nice.
Listening to two Spaniards, probably brothers, play Pachelbel's Canon, with feeling, on violin and bass, in Barcelona.
Wandering around Palma de Mallorca and buying stamps for post cards we wrote and failed to mail.
Sa Tuerredda beach on Sardinia after the rain stopped and the sun came out.
The fact that we could be in Rome one day and Sunnyvale the next.

Far Away

2010-08-01T09:22:00.000-07:00

For a number of years now, I've been following the progress of Eye Talk as it has evolved from rock band to something harder to define.

In its current form the group has pared down to its two core members, brothers Alan and Bob Clark. Older brother Alan has always been the driving force behind Eye Talk, writing nearly all of the songs, singing and playing lead guitar, but lately he's been encouraging his bass-playing brother to write more.

As a result, their latest release, Far Away, features five songs from each brother — and represents their most accomplished and compelling work to date.

Here are a few short samples, with each singing lead on his own songs:

Where do we go from here? (Alan Clark)

One more chance (Bob Clark)

Until now (Bob Clark)

Whole lives before us (Alan Clark)

That last one always get to me.

What Does the Word "Story" Mean to You?

2010-07-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

I did an interview recently in The Short Review (which also featured A.J. Kirby's insightful review of my story collection, Precarious).

I tried to keep my answers short because that's my strategy to avoid boring people. It's been my strategy since I was in the first grade, but that's another story.

No, that's not fair. I'll tell you.

A classmate asked me what I got for Christmas and I started with the mundane stuff like new pajamas and socks. The kid turned away before I got to the really cool thing, a slot-car set, probably the best present a boy could get back then.

So, lesson learned.

Back here in the future I was asked, “What does the word 'story' mean to you?”

Good question. I had never been asked that before. Never really thought about, either.

I said, “I guess a story is what we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. The stories may not be factual but they are as true as we can make them … or as true as we can stand to make them.”

I left it at that because shorter is always better and because I couldn't remember all the stuff I'd heard about memory not being reliable so we fill in the blanks with whatever makes the most sense and over time that becomes part of our so-called memory.

I also meant to imply that we sometimes make up stories to fool ourselves, but you got that, right?

At a party once, someone asked me, "How many of your stories are based on your own life?"

"Three," I said.

I wouldn't say which three.

The truth is I would have a hard time separating fact from fiction in those stories. Did that happen to me or did I make it up? I'm not sure.

“But,” as Ken Kesey wrote, “it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

Behind the Story: "Just Admit It"

2010-06-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

"Just Admit It" is another one of my earliest stories. The first draft was written for a creative writing class when I was in college.

To this day, more than 30 years later, I remember the instructor telling me where the story picked up interest for him, which was about a third of the way into what was then called "The Sinner and the Would-Be Savior."

It was a painful but important lesson that helped to shape everything I've written since then.

In the years that followed, I rewrote the story several times, in the first person, third person, first person, third person. I could never seem to make up my mind which would be better.

As I began to gather my stories into a collection, "Just Admit It" was in, then out, then in again after one final round of changes.

In Precarious, the final version of "Just Admit It" is in the first person, but I suppose I could change it in a future edition. I could even go back to the original title, which I still like, even if it is a bit long.

Then again ...

It's a wonder I finished any of these stories.

Behind the Story: "What She Said"

2010-05-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

This was my breakthrough. That's what I thought when I wrote it. But it didn't become my breakthrough for another decade.

When I wrote "What She Said," I was working for a city magazine in San Francisco and the executive editor wanted to publish it. Her boss, as it turned out, did not.

Aaargh!

So I sent the story around to eight or nine other places. They all said no.

I gave up.

A decade later (give or take a couple years) I took another look at the story. It was lean and sharp and fast. I liked it. With a few small changes I sent it to the Beloit Fiction Journal. The editor at the time, Shawn Gillen, said yes.

Soon I had a work of fiction in print for the first time.

Behind the Story: "Don't Stop Now"

2010-04-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

I started this one when I was still in high school. In the years that followed, it grew into a short novel and kept getting longer.

I'd be embarrassed to have anyone read the full manuscript now, so it remains hidden away. But I'm glad I didn't simply burn it.

At some point I remembered that a friend said he really liked the chapter at the lake. So I took another look. It had potential.

The result is "Don't Stop Now" (first published in Hobart and now part of my story collection, Precarious).

I think of it as the Reader's Digest version of that first failed novel — a 342-page manuscript condensed to just 6 pages.

Behind the Story: "Sleeping with Smiley"

2010-03-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

If you'll indulge me, I thought I might share the story behind some of the stories in my collection.

The first story, "Sleeping with Smiley," began its life as a screenplay, and I chose the setting and the sport for their cinematic possibilities.

Later "Smiley" turned into a novel, back into a screenplay, then a novel again, and finally a short story, which is how I like it best.

Here's a little glimpse of the screenplay:

FADE IN:

EXT. ROGUE RIVER — EARLY MORNING

All we see is the surface of the water, blue and calm, as the credits flash on and off the screen. Occasionally we hear the CRY of a seagull and see its shadow pass over the water. A fishing trawler CHUGGING out to sea can also be faintly heard.

As the last credit disappears there’s a brief silence, and then we see it: the narrow, pointed bow of a rowing shell glides into view, followed by the oars — two of them, close up, on the same side of the boat. They catch the water, not in unison but one slightly behind the other, and the boat lurches a bit.

The camera PULLS BACK and we stay with the boat as it moves along the river. The two scullers, the morning sun behind them now, are seen only in silhouette at first. The one nearer the bow is tall and lean; the other is several inches shorter but more muscular.

NARRATOR

I remember the river and the way it looked at dawn,
the feel of my oars catching the water in time with
Curt’s. The muscles don’t forget. Though twelve years
have passed, I can feel the strain even now in my legs
and lower back, in my shoulders and in my arms. It
was that summer between the end of high school and
the start of something else. Curt and I were best friends.

THE DOCK NEARBY

Standing on the edge is a massive man, bald except for a short white fringe. His name is WARREN ALT and he is dressed more like a gym teacher than the wealthy easterner he is.

ALT

(hands cupped around mouth)

Now, give me a power twenty!

THE TWO SCULLERS

are seen from over their shoulders. They really start pulling now, putting their backs into it, but their strokes don’t quite match.

The tall sculler notices the difference and shortens his stroke. Now the angle of his oars matches that of his shorter partner, and they start to glide, swiftly and smoothly, for the first time.

RESERVE ANGLE

We see the scullers faces as they continue to row in almost perfect synchronization. Setting the pace is 18-year-old CURT HUTTON, the shorter, more muscular one. When his face is not contorted with the strain of all-out rowing, he is exceptionally handsome.

Behind him is DEAN STOCKTON, who is also 18 and whose mature voice provides our narration. Although the muscles on his less-than-handsome face are slack, the pain still shows through.

ON THE DOCK

Mr. Alt paces slowly, following the boys’ progress. He stops, folds his arms, and nod appreciatively, but says nothing.

THE SHELL

continues to gain speed, and as it does, the expressions on the boys’ faces begin to change. We see a series of quick cuts — the bow cutting through the river ... the splash of the oars as they catch the glassy water and pull ... the boys’ seats sliding in the shell as they bend and straighten their knees — interspersed with close-ups of the boys as their eyes brighten, and smiles appear and grow on their faces.

When they finish the 20 power strokes, it’s as if they have crossed a finish line. Their oars come up and the shell continues to glide.

FAVORING CURT

as he looks over his shoulder at Dean and lets out a whoop.

DEAN'S VOICE

Rowing in harmony was an experience we would never
be able to describe. But then we wouldn’t really need to.
Not to each other.

The Glow in the Jar

2010-02-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

Sky Sanchez, writing for the Sacramento Book Review:
"A dwelling teetering on the lip between dark and light, resignation and defiance, brokenness and unity; the short story, a world of possibilities within the confines of so few pages, and to capture them is to watch lightning bugs bump into the walls of a jar. What will the characters make of it? How will they get out? Al Riske has taken this form and made light in his collection, Precarious, not that he has made light of his characters, though. He has given them voices of volume, of life. Each story carries weight of its own, leading to the common denominator that we are all flawed. You will meet a man who loses what he needs in search of what he thinks he wants; a pastor who is shunned by those he preaches forgiveness to; and a man with a new set of eyes. Riske's stories reveal impulses and happiness, the search of and, sometimes, the consequences following. You will experience all of it through a keyhole, unnoticed, but aching all the same for these that live it. Riske uses words to bring us closer to the glow in the jar."

'Enthusiastically Recommended'

2010-02-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

Midwest Book Review says:
"The literary art and tradition of the short story is alive and well in Precarious: Stories Of Love, Sex, And Misunderstanding, by Al Riske. This collection of fifteen short stories ranges from tales set in Seattle during the rainy season to California during an extended drought. From a Cape Cod vacation cabin to a get-a-way island. These are deftly written stories that not only entertain, but engender reflection long after they are finished and Precarious is placed back upon the shelf. It should be noted that one of these unique tales, "Pray for Rain," won the 2008 Blue Mesa Review prize for fiction. Precarious is enthusiastically recommended reading for anyone who appreciates the literary artistry of the short story format and an ideal addition for community library fiction collections."

Joy and Gratitude

2010-01-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

I flew to Indianapolis over the weekend — my first visit to a beautiful, vibrant city made more beautiful but no less vibrant by a blanket of snow.

I was there for a party thrown by my publisher, Luminis Books, celebrating the release of its first three titles and previewing a fourth.

The party took place within the charming confines of Big Hat Books, where I got to see Precarious displayed in a store window instead of a web browser for the first time.

Excited? Me? You better believe it.

A steady stream of people came to wish us all well, and near the end of our time there, the upstairs was packed with people sipping wine, munching crackers and cheese and olives and tiny desserts.

Everyone was talking about books. Our books.

That's when I got the question: "How many of your stories are based on your own life?"

"Three," I said.

Which three, I wasn't saying.

I had never talked so much with so many people about myself and my writing. It was fun, because the good people of Indianapolis seemed genuinely interested.

Twelve people bought my book and asked me to sign it — and I did, with joy and gratitude.

What Copy Editors Know

2010-01-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

Highlights from an article I put together years ago, when I was part of the crack copy-editing team at San Francisco Focus ...

"Whenever writers say, 'Not to quibble,' they're about to quibble."
"There's no comma in 'Louie Louie,' no period in Dr Pepper, and no apostrophe in Grants Pass. There should be but there isn't."
"'Not to mention' is a mention."
"It's okay to end a sentence with a preposition. Always has been. I don't care what English teacher told you. That's the sort of bogus rule up with which I will not put."
"The word very is supposed to be an intensifier, but it's used so much that most statements are stronger without it."
"Isn't it weird how many exceptions there are to the rule: i before e except after c?"
"Never begin a story with 'Yes, Virginia,' 'According to Webster's,' or 'What do ____, _____, and _____ have in common?'"
"Most stories can be improved if you shorten them by about a third."
"I believe it was Rene J. Cappon, the veteran Associated Press editor, who said: 'Call a spade a spade and you evoke a picture. Call it an agricultural implement and you might be talking about a plow, a rake, or an air-conditioned tractor."
"Quotes are doctored all the time in the name of clarity and grammar. Q&A interviews look like transcripts, but they're not. You wouldn't want to read them if they were."
"Never use an exclamation point!"

Sex and the Short Story

2010-01-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of 34th Parallel — Issue 9 — is now available, and it contains a real first for me.

Over the years I've interviewed a lot of people for newspapers, magazines, and websites, but this marks the first time someone has interviewed me.

Just check out the cover headline:

Gretchen Clark Interviews Al Riske
SEX AND THE SHORT STORY

Gretchen is a widely published essayist — I'm particularly fond of "This Is a Woman" — who teaches creative nonfiction at Writers.com. She also happens to be my sister-in-law and the first person I turn to for feedback on my own writing.

It was a fun interview and really made me think. I hope you'll check it out.

In My Hands

2009-12-21T16:31:00.000-08:00

I'm holding it right now.

An advance copy of my book, Precarious.

It looks great and feels, well, substantial.

I like feeling the weight of it, the glossy cover. I like flipping through the pages, all 242 of them. I even like the slightly musty smell.

And I love the design. Thank you, Joanne.

Electronic books are cool, but give me ink on paper. Nothing could make a writer's first book more ... real.

Out Loud

2009-12-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

The first time I read one of my stories in public, I was in the basement of a bar in San Francisco and there was a live band playing upstairs.

I didn't have a microphone and had to shout to be heard.

That was back in March when Switchback was celebrating the launch of Issue 9, which included a story of mine called "Skittish," about a woman who is attracted to a man with muscles because it makes her feel safe … until it doesn’t.

Not the kind of story I wanted to shout. Especially since I was writing from the woman's point of view and saying things like:

I catch Paul watching me, but just as quickly I pretend not to notice. I don't know what it is about my neck. Guys are always kissing it or wanting to kiss it.

Shouting that felt surreal. Try it, if you don't believe me.

I got another chance to read Friday night, and I again found myself shouting. But this time it was because the story, "Disengaged," called for shouting.

They were quickly out of town on the two-lane to the coast. Noise from the engine and the rush of hot August air made it necessary to shout.
"The wedding if off!"
"I just got the invitation today."
"It's off."

This was at the Gallery House in Palo Alto, and I was one of several writers taking part in the Peninsula Literary Series.

Naturally I flubbed a few lines — saying "big sure" when I meant "Big Sur," for example — but the reading went better than I had imagined. Better than I had rehearsed it.

I even remembered to look up at the audience from time to time.

Of course it really helped to have friendly go-to faces out there, so many thanks to the friends who came out to hear me. You made it fun.

Rediscovering Carver

2009-11-27T12:22:00.001-08:00

I've been rediscovering Raymond Carver. Turns out he wasn't a minimalist after all. Even though that's what he's famous for.

His editor, Gordon Lish, was the minimalist, slashing many of Carver's stories by half. Others by even more. This was especially true in the case of the groundbreaking collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Now, in a new volume called Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, we get to see the writer's original drafts along with the cut-down versions of those stories.

The originals are better.

I say that even though I've always been a big fan of minimalism.

(For a good visual of Lish's edits, check out "Beginners," Edited in The New Yorker.)

It's hard to say how successful Carver would have been without Lish. It was Lish who gave him his first national exposure in Esquire and championed him with agents and editors.

And Carver was forever grateful to him for changing his life.

Because of Lish, who moved from Esquire to Knopf, Carver became known as "the foremost practitioner of minimalist fiction," as the new dust jacket indicates. But the original stories were not only much longer, they were far richer and, for me, more deeply felt.

Lish was clearly a talented editor, and I admire many of his changes (as did Carver). Still, I seriously doubt that we would know the name Gordon Lish if it weren't for Carver.

So both men benefited, I suppose, but it's heart-breaking to read the long letter Carver wrote to Lish — included in the notes to the new volume — begging him not to move ahead with his radically altered version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

It's hard not to think of Lish as an ass.

The contract for that book gave Lish the final say, but that changed for the next collection, Cathedral, and Carver accepted only minor changes.

So, clearly Carver had a boatload of talent all on his own, but he still might have labored in obscurity without the big break Lish gave him.

And now we get to see the original versions and Carver is back in the news and selling more books and it all turns out for the best.

I love a happy ending.

"Charming" - Publishers Weekly

2009-11-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

I won't lie to you. The first review of Precarious was ... not great.

The first line was OK: "The lovelorn characters in Riske's debut collection are riven by confusion, to sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating effect."

But then the reviewer chose to focus on the (apparently) infuriating parts. The charming parts? Not so much.

Still, I suppose, it was somewhat of a coup to be reviewed in Publishers Weekly at all. (I'm including a link, but I'd really rather you didn't go there. See this instead.)

But there was good news, too.

Based on PW's not-so-great review, someone named Erica contacted my publisher to see if movie and TV rights are still available.

Which is interesting because, coincidentally, the first story in the collection. "Sleeping with Smiley," started out as a screenplay.

If anything comes of the inquiry, I'll let you know.

From the Shadows to the Marketplace

2009-11-06T12:34:00.000-08:00

Though he's only been writing fiction for a short time, my good friend Mark Richardson writes with the assurance of a seasoned professional, and in just the past year he's had his first three short stories published:

> Tattoo Woman
"She had no tattoos when she left him. Just white twenty-two-year-old skin..."
> Boardwalk Gypsy
"From the balcony of my highrise Santa Monica condo, I looked down at the cars and bike riders and T-shirt clad pedestrians moving freely..."
> Moaning
"Orgasmic moans float through my open window and I get horny. It’s just before dusk in late September..."

Mark's non-fiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Literary Traveler, and Dusty Shelf.

Keep up the great work, my friend. Can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Writers on Writing

2009-10-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

Wit and wisdom from some of the best ...

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." —William Saroyan

“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning bolt and the lightning bug.” —Mark Twain

“I hate writing. I love having written.” —Dorothy Parker

"Kill your darlings." —William Faulkner

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."—Douglas Adams

"Take out the sentence you love best. You're trying too hard." —David Sedaris

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” —W. Somerset Maugham

“So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.” —Dr. Seuss
“The goal of writing is not to be understood but to write so as not to be misunderstood.” —Cicero

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.” —William Faulkner

“It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." —Robert Heinlein

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” —Stephen King

“There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” —Red Smith

The Informers

2009-09-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

I love the way Brett Easton Ellis writes; I just don't like what he writes about.

He takes things too far.

I was fascinated by the world he created in The Informers — not so much a novel as a collection of overlapping stories, each vignette told in the first person by a different character — but a few of the later chapters conveyed more than I wanted to know about human nature.

The violence was too real, too depraved.

Worse, there was no hope. Not a shred of optimism anywhere.

That said, I did come away with one positive observation. It seemed to me that, without saying so, Ellis may have been trying to show us — in graphic and convincing detail — that riches, fame, and the ability to do whatever we want are not enough to satisfy.

Not unless we have better imaginations than his characters.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

2009-08-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

David Eagleman's Sum is the most surprising, delightful, and thought-provoking book I've read in a long, long time.

In its far-flung flights of imagination, it reminds me of Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman (who is quoted on the back cover). Instead of concepts about time, though, the subject of Sum is the afterlife.

What I like most, I think, is that many of the forty possible afterlives Eagleman dreams up turn out to be lessons in unintended consequences. For us and for God.

Beach Cabin

2009-08-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

This post is coming to you from my private ocean-side cabin.

The one in my head.

In reality, I'm in a shed in my backyard.

I call it a shed because it was built by an outfit called The Shed Shop, but it's much more than a shed. It has a real door and windows and electricity and wi-fi access.

I like to think of it as a rustic beach cabin, though. That's why I have a window-size picture of Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach, Oregon, hanging on the wall.

But I also have a bulletin board covered with postcards from New Mexico. I'm working on a novel set in Taos and the postcards are supposed to put me in a New Mexico frame of mind. Not sure how well that has worked but it hasn't hurt. The novel is coming along nicely.

The cabin ... I mean, shed ... was my wife's idea and has provided a very real retreat ever since it went up last year.

Thanks, Joanne. I never would have done it without you.

Why Did I Write These?

2009-07-28T12:52:00.000-07:00

I got an interesting question from my publisher yesterday: Why did I write the stories in Precarious?

Believe it or not, I never really thought about why I wrote them.

The stories in the collection (due out in February) were written over a period of 30 years and are all very different, but as it turns out, they're all about the same thing. Women and men. An endlessly fascinating topic. I suppose I wrote them to figure out how I felt about certain things.

The great thing about stories is they can make you feel what someone else felt. The better the story, the more subtle and nuanced the feelings. Anyway, that's what I look for as a reader. The surprise as a writer is how you can make yourself feel things you never felt before or never knew you felt.

Writers are like actors. We get to play a lot of different roles, try out a range of personalities, and live lives very different from our own.

I wrote these stories to find out what would happen to the characters and how things would turn out for them.

I wrote them because I felt like I had some things to say that I couldn't say any other way.

Delayed, in a Good Way

2009-07-03T06:36:00.000-07:00

The publication date for my story collection, Precarious, is being pushed out until January or February. While I can't help but feel let down — eager as I am to hold the final product in my hands — the delay is actually good news.

It means that extra care is going into the release of my book.

It means that Midpoint — a major distributor that my publishers recently signed up — is putting together a more detailed marketing plan for us.

So I can wait. In fact, I'm happy to wait.

I'm actually more excited now, and more hopeful about the book's prospects, than I've ever been.

Memory Aids

2009-05-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how bad my memory is. With the help of my wife (and the ticket stubs she saves), I now realize I forgot to include more than a dozen artists on my list of concerts seen. When you see the names, you'll understand just how forgetful I've become:

The Beach Boys, David Bowie, Chris Isaak, B.B. King, Little Feat, John Lee Hooker, Lucinda Williams, Eddie Money, Santana, the Grateful Dead, the Chieftains, Big Country, Stevie Nicks, the Association, the Grass Roots, Sara McLachlan, Joan Osbourne, Paula Cole, Jewel, Mike Scott, the Uninvited, the San Francisco Symphony, and, not long ago, Vieux Farka Toure.

Random List of Lists

2009-05-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

I have lived in Washington, Oregon, and California.

I have visited Mexico, Canada, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Tahiti, Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary.

I have traveled by train, bus, car, plane, helicopter, jet, Goodyear blimp, sailboat, canoe, kayak, cruise ship, cable car, bike, motorcycle, horse, mule, and elephant (briefly).

I have swam in the Pacific Ocean, the Aegean Sea, and the Dead Sea.

I have skied on snow and skated on ice.

I have been to the top of the Space Needle and the Sears Tower and part way up the Statue of Liberty,

I have hiked down into the Grand Canyon.

I have worked as a farm laborer, grocery clerk, cook, bookseller, woodworker, reporter, editor, copywriter, and ghostwriter.

I finished a marathon in Oregon and a half-marathon on Maui.

I have seen live performances by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Ricki Lee Jones, Boz Skaggs, Tina Turner, John Mellencamp, Dire Straits, Bob Seger, Heart, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Gordon Lightfoot, Kim Carnes, Gary U.S. Bonds, Seals & Crofts, Helen Reddy, Southside Johnny and the Ashbury Jukes, Clarence Clemons and the Red Bank Rockers, Taj Mahal, Mavis Staples, America, the Doobie Brothers, the Pogues, the Waterboys, and the Monkees.

I have been in restaurants with Joe DiMaggio and Jerry Rice and didn't bother them.

I very nearly ran into Kenny Loggins, who was trying to get in to see Martin Mull as I was coming out.

I was within shouting distance of Hillary Clinton at Disney World when she was First Lady.

I've had conversations with Frank Shorter, Rosie Greer, and Nate Thurmond.

I once won $100 for telling a joke.

Origins

2009-03-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

Friends took us to see Lily Tomlin at the Fox Theater in Redwood City last night. Tomlin reprised (and updated) routines that featured her most famous characters, Ernestine and Edith Anne. She also did some familiar bits from "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe."

There was plenty of new material as well. Great stuff. All of it.

I don't know if it was new or not, but my favorite part of the show was Tomlin's take on the origins of language. She imagines a caveman stubbing his toe and hollering, "Ouch!" Then she has him pondering, "I wonder what I meant by that."

(It's funnier when she tells it.)

What do you think? Could "ouch" have been the first word?

Bellissimo!

2009-03-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I mentioned that I'm working on a short novel with a long title. For a small taste (just 500 words), check out the latest edition of Word Riot, which includes an excerpt called, "Bellissimo!"

Love it or hate it, feel free to leave a comment at the end of the story.

Suit and Countersuit

2009-03-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

The feud between the Associated Press and the artist who created the famous Obama posters continues.

The artist, Shepard Fairey, sued first (a sort of preemptive strike) and now the AP has countered with a suit of its own.

Apparently, Fairey used an AP photo taken by Mannie Garcia as the basis for his highly stylized and stunningly different red, white, and blue image.

Just as Fairey's creation is not entirely his own, neither is Garcia's -- after all, he did not create Obama's face.

The AP should keep in mind that the courts awarded photographers the right to create and publish images of public people and public places in order to further the nascent art of photography.

I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect the courts will rule in favor of Fairey and his transformative work for much the same reason.

What to Say

2009-02-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

What are you supposed to say when your dream becomes real?

What are you supposed to feel after years of trying and failing and succeeding a little, and then — pow! — somebody wants to publish your book?

You say thank you and feel grateful, that's what.

The contract for my first book has been signed and executed, my advance is on its way, and for that I say thank you to Chris and Tracy, the publishers of Luminis Books.

I'm grateful to them and a lot of other people.

First, last, and always, Joanne, my wife, who never stopped believing in me over the past 30-odd years and predicted this would be the year for me.

Then, a long list of friends and family who were there to give me the encouragement, criticism, and inspiration I needed: Gretchen Clark, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Greg Bardsley, Mark Richardson, Dee Edler, Karen Croft, Heidi Benson, Rachel Canon, Linda Drake, Terry McKenzie, Carrie Motamedi, Lisa Buchanan, Adair Lara, Amy Rennert, Steve Kettmann, Bronwen Hruska, Dan and Sandra Aunspaugh, Doug and Kristen Edwards, Jane Todd, Dan Rasmussen, Bill Rennie, Darel Capps, Judy DeMocker, Jill Berman, Starline Judkins, Denise Pinto, Doreen Wu, JungAe Kim, and many others along the way.

I'm especially grateful to Shawn Gillen, the former editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, who published my first short story. And to Savannah Guz of Hobart, Nora Fussner of Pindeldyboz, Laura Matter of the Blue Mesa Review, and Kelly Krumrie of Switchback, who published more of them.

I hear the orchestra starting to play, so I guess that means my time is up ... Wait, where's my statue?

Oh, the book is called Precarious: Stories of Love, Sex, and Misunderstanding. It will be available in bookstores and online later this year.

I know I'm forgetting someone ... A special tip of the hat to my friend Jim Mize, who coined the indispensable phrase "Tell me the truth but try not to hurt my feelings."

What? No, I'm not leaving without my statue! Where the ...

25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-25T19:41:00.000-08:00

1. I'm a Scorpio. That surprises people. I don't know why.
2. I'm very open and very secretive at the same time.
3. I am trying to be what God wants me to be: free.
4. I'm fond of singers with distinctive voices: Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen ...
5. I believe in being undecided about most things.
6. I'm writing a short novel with a long title: The Boy Who Broke Sabrina's Window.
7. I like to travel almost as much as I like to stay at home.
8. All through school I was horrible at spelling, but I'm pretty good at it now.
9. I once ran the Seaside Marathon in Oregon, but it took me five hours to finish.
10. I've never wished I was somebody else.
11. I think I may be the slowest reader on the planet.
12. I have a red belt in Dahn Mu Do.
13. I never liked my hair until my friends started going bald.
14. I'm told my mother tried to abort me (she'd had five kids already), but I know she loved me deeply.
15. I like offbeat movies like Rushmore and Juno.
16. I've always wished I could sing.
17. I'm always buying blank books even though I only write on a computer.
18. I tend to keep things for years, thinking I might need them.
19. I used to be a neat-freak, but I'm mostly over it.
20. I've been married to the world's kindest person for 32 years.
21. I am the only member of my immediate family who was conceived in America.
22. Always small for my age, I was only 5-foot-6 when I entered high school (and 6'1" when I graduated).
23. Favorite quote: "Tell me the truth, but try not to hurt my feelings."
24. I don't like goals or deadlines.
25. I've never really planned anything about my life, other than becoming a writer.

The Amazing Internet

2008-12-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

It's amazing what you can learn about yourself on the Internet.

As a cross-country runner in high school, I had placed 82nd in the state championship, in Oregon. That much I knew.

What I learned on the Internet was that I had run the race in 13 minutes and 30 seconds.

I don't think I had ever known that. I certainly didn't expect to find it on the net.

It was a long time ago. 1972.

But there it is in black and white. The winning time, I see, was 11 minutes, 54 seconds.

I also see that three of my teammates finished ahead of me, three behind. I had almost forgotten their names, but now I can picture them clearly.

Dan Aunspaugh, Ed Nelson, Randy Herman, Doug Parham, Bob Knytysch, Steve Stoyles -- great bunch of guys.

Prize-Winning Story

2008-10-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

It was dry that summer, as it had been for several years in California. Dry and hot. I remember sitting in church the first Sunday after I returned from college. The air was still, and though it was an evening service, you never would have known it the way the sun was gleaming through the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. The pastor wasn't there, because the congregation was going to vote on whether or not to keep him.

This was in Big Valley, near Clear Lake. The church was Conservative Baptist — a white clapboard building with a bell tower and a cross on top. A local radio station carried the morning service each Sunday. Not that I ever heard the broadcast. I was always there. At least I was until I went off to college. But I always came back in the summer, and now I was back for, well, whatever.

The story, now appearing in the Blue Mesa Review, is called "Pray for Rain." It's my fourth work of fiction to be published and the first to win a prize.

"Based on plot, complexity, character development and interesting story-lines, 'Pray For Rain' stood out from the rest," wrote judge Alexis Hurley of Inkwell Management. "Al Riske is playing with themes of religion, youth and sexuality in very adept and thoughtful ways."

If any of that sounds interesting, why not support the good folks at the Blue Mesa and order a copy of Issue 21.

(You can also order by phone at 1-800-249-7737.)

The Good Brother

2008-09-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

Shelton, Washington. 1960 or thereabouts. My older brother and I are in the basement of the house on Satsup Street. We're fighting. I run for the stairs. Two steps up, I turn.

"You want me to slug you?" he says.

A stupid question, I think, but it lets me know that he has the power to hurt me. As if I didn't already know that. He's 8, I'm 6.

"You want me to slug you?" he asks again. "I will."

I should run upstairs. Our mother is up there and she'll protect me. I'm the favorite. Her good son. Still, I don't move.

"You want me to slug you?"

Again with the question! Does he think I'm stupid?

"Yeah, I want you to slug me," I say.

I am stupid. He slugs me in the gut. Hard. It hurts like hell.

Our mother intervenes, and my brother Harold has the perfect defense: "He told me to slug him."

Mom tells him he should be ashamed of himself. Perhaps he is.

Perhaps he is for the rest of his life. He tries to make it up to his little brother, the innocent victim, but the relationship remains strained until the day he dies, young, of lung cancer.

The truth is he was the victim of a little brother, me, who knew how to play his parents.

He was the good brother, and now I'd like to set him free.

Let your spirit fly, Harry. I forgive you if you forgive me.

Another First

2008-07-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Call it sudden fiction. Call it flash fiction. Call it a short short. Call it whatever you like.

My first piece in the genre — variously defined as under 500 words or under 1000 — has just been posted by one of my favorite online journals, Pindeldyboz.

Pin´del•dy•boz (Pin' dl dë bôz), n. 1. A feeling of confusion and/or anxiety, when ingeniously anesthetized by obese amounts of levity. 2. A situation of confusion and/or anxiety, when tampered with in the same manner as above.

The story is called "Disappointed," but Web editor Nora Fussner, I'm pleased to say, was not.

"I found myself thinking about the character Petra after I put the story down," she said, "a mark of any strong story."

It should only take you a minute to read. Maybe less.

Crime Spree

2008-06-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

My good friend Greg Bardsley is on a hot streak. The guy just keeps pumping out crime stories and the 'zines keep snapping them up:

"Three-Sixty Wonder Girl" (Demolition)
"Big Load of Trouble" (Thuglit)
"She Don't Like Hecklers" (Pulp Pusher)
"Upper Deck" (Plots with Guns)
"Funny Face" (Storyglossia)

They snap them up so fast it makes you wonder if he has some dirt on all those editors or what.

But I can tell you that's not it. It's just that the guy has style. And a wicked imagination. And nobody has more fun with a story than Greg does.

I guarantee you'll be seeing more from him soon.

A Million Little Facts

2008-05-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still reading James Frey's new book, Bright Shiny Morning -- 150 pages to go.

What keeps me going is I've always found Los Angeles fascinating, as a place and as a symbol.

The book is about L.A.

L.A. is the main character.

L.A. is the only thing holding the narrative together.

There's just enough there to keep me going, but I can't say I'd recommend the book to anyone. Unless Frey manages to pull everything together at the end. Which I still hope he can do. But I doubt it.

At times I've been tempted to throw the book through a window or tear it into a million little pieces, a million little pieces. The writing is that bad. Sometimes. Sometimes it's brilliant though. Sometimes it really works.

The book got a great review in the New York Times. Said Frey redeemed himself.

Good, I thought.

I had been waiting for Frey to come out with a novel, not a phony memoir like A Million Little Pieces (which I loved and later hated because it was all a lie).

Oddly, the book doesn't say "A Novel" on the cover or anywhere else. There's just the title and the author's name and that page at the beginning that says:

"Nothing about this book should be considered accurate or reliable."

Nice touch.

Then, between each chapter, you're treated to a historical anecdote. And whole chapters are devoted to fun facts and not fun facts about L.A. There are chapters about the highway system, about the neighborhoods, about the rockers, surfers, slaves, and stars who make up the City of Dreams.

Characters come and go and a few of them come back but not as many as you would think.

The irony is that this work of fiction has more facts in it than Frey's so-called memoir.

Not that I can vouch for their accuracy.

Spring Break, Before MTV

2008-04-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

“See any bikinis yet?”

That was the first thing Dan said to me when we crossed from Oregon into California in the spring of 1974. It became a refrain. Each time Highway 101 allowed us a glimpse of the ocean, one of us would ask the question.

“See any bikinis yet?”

It was always worth a smile, and after the first few hours, when our excitement turned to impatience and then fatigue, we sorely needed a bit of comic relief.

We spent the night trying to sleep in reclining bucket seats of Dan's Mercury Capri and got on the road again at day break. We didn’t get to my brother’s house in L.A. until late in the evening — and he was surprised to see us that soon.

“I thought we’d never make it,” Dan said.

“And you tried to tell me it would be an eight-hour drive,” I said.

My brother, Rudi, threw back his head and laughed.

“Yeah, well, about halfway down here I asked Al to figure out how many miles we had to go, and he came up with — tell him.”

“About 2,400 miles,” I admitted.

Rudi laughed again.

“I was looking at this chart in the road atlas that gives the distances between cities,” I explained, “and I traced the wrong line.”

“What makes it bad,” Dan said, “was I believed him.”

Dan and I had been best friends in high school and were now (in 1974) freshmen at different colleges. This week, spring break, and this trip, the first to California for either of us, was our chance to catch up and renew our friendship — to re-create the good times we had never wanted to end.

We spent most of the next day, a Monday, at Disneyland, and when the sun went down we went back.

"Listen, if you find someone and I strike out, I’ll meet you in the parking lot at midnight," I said. "You can drop me off at Rudi’s or something."

Dan had always been far more successful at the dating game than I ever was.

"No," he assured me, "either we both make it, or neither one of us does."

We bought a couple of root beers and sat down at what passes for a sidewalk cafe at Disneyland. The bare tables were round and white, and we had a clear view of the Mark Twain, a three-story riverboat that looked twice as tall, its lights reflected in the dark water. Dan sat with his elbows on the table, both hands encircling his drink. His face carried no expression.

“You watch that direction,” he said quietly. “I’ll look for anyone coming my way.”

We sat in silence for a long while, and when I looked at Dan I couldn’t tell if the slightly bored expression on his face was intentional or merely real. We finished our root beers, let the ice melt a bit, and drank that. Then we sucked on the remaining cubes until our mouths were numb.

Finally, we started walking again. A couple of beautiful dark-eyed girls — possibly twins, but certainly sisters — passed in the opposite direction.

“You see those two?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I stopped. “Wanna follow them?”

“Okay.”

He was more subdued than I would have thought. I lost track of the girls and started to hurry.

“Where’d they go?”

“Take it easy,” Dan said. “They’re sitting over here.”

A subtle flick of his head showed me where to look. He kept walking, eyes front; I glanced over my shoulder. They were sitting on a bench by a street lamp.

We stopped by a wrought-iron fence a short distance away and looked out across the water at Tom Sawyer Island. We tried to lean casually on the fence, but it was too low — built with an eight-year-old in mind.

I said, “Well, what do you think?”

Dan didn’t answer; I persisted.

“Looks like a perfect opportunity.”

“We’ve got to think of something to say,” he replied.

It surprised me that he’d have to think about what he would say. I don’t know why. I had no idea what we’d say. I guess I thought this sort of thing came naturally to him.

“How about asking them how to get somewhere?” he said. “Look in our ticket books to see what’s left. Then we can make like we don’t understand their directions and ask them to take us there.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Take me to Fantasyland.”

“Okay, then you think of something.”

The idea I came up with was unbelievably bad. I suggested we pick up some trinket at one of the shops nearby and try to sell it to the girls. “And of course we come with whatever it is we’re selling — like a cash rebate, only better.”

Dan looked at me and almost laughed.

“No, really,” I said.

“You’re serious.”

“It could work.”

I don’t know why I persisted, but I did, and since we didn’t have all night, Dan said, “Okay, see what you can get.”

The girls’ parents came for them while I was gone.

We soon found ourselves in the plaza, where a well-scrubbed rock band was taking the stage. Behind us, off to one side, were two fine-looking blondes — one wearing shorts and a tank top, the other in a denim skirt and white blouse.

We watched the band.

“What about those two?”

“Too tall,” Dan said.

The one in the white blouse must have been nearly six feet (my height); the one in the tank top, about five-nine (a little taller than Dan).

“I’d take the taller one,” I said. “Why don’t we ask them?”

“Wait a minute,” Dan said. “I’m getting my nerve up.”

Again with the nerves. This was not the Dan I knew. More than once I had found myself flirting with an attractive high-school classmate and not asking her out because she would have been yet another girl Dan had already dated.

Just then the California girls of our dreams walked right by us and smiled.

We watched them disappear.

“They were looking right at us the whole time,” Dan said. “Al, we should have asked them. The short one looked me straight in the eye.”

I shook my head. “We blew it.”

“It was my fault,” Dan said.

“I should have stopped them,” I said. “I should have said something.”

We sat on a curb across the lane from the plaza and watched the dancing from a distance. None of this made any sense, unless you knew one thing: Less than a year earlier Dan had been ready to marry Sandy — right up until she called off the wedding.

“They’ll be back,” he assured me. “I got a feeling they’ll come back. They’ve got to. They can’t leave use like this.”

His tone, at first depressed, shifted to a sort of lighthearted mock-desperation on the last sentence. We smiled. Sure, they’d be back looking for us.

We sat on that curb a long time, listening to the band play all the songs we’d heard on the radio during the drive down.

“Won’t be long now,” Dan said.

No, Unmasked

2008-03-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

Tears were streaming down my cheeks as I drove to work this morning.

It's hard to face no after no after no. Really makes a mark on your confidence, like graffiti on a building adding up to ugly.

I'm learning, though.

Whether you stare down no nine times or seventeen times or twenty-one times, all it takes is one yes to erase it all. Gone. Forgotten. Meaningless.

I'm talking about stories I've written and rejection letters I've received.

All it took was one journal to say yes to "What She Said."

One to say yes to "Don't Stop Now."

And now one to say yes to "Pray for Rain."

This time there's even prize money involved as "Pray for Rain" has just been named the winner of the Blue Mesa Review fiction contest and will be included in Issue 21, due out in May.

But more important than any prize, large or small, is knowing that someone gets your story. That they understand the nuances that others missed.

So I'd like to say thank you to the good folks at the Beloit Fiction Journal, Hobart, Blue Mesa Review, and Inkwell Management (final judges of the contest).

For me the frustration of no upon no melted away this morning in a delayed reaction of sudden tears as Bruce Springsteen sang, "It's been a long time coming, my dear. It's been a long time coming, but now it's here."

I was singing, too, at the top of my lungs.

No is an imposter.

Hot Spot

2008-03-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

News flash ... or should I say flash news?

The master of the "flash" form of literary nonfiction, Gretchen Clark, is back this month with "A Hot Spot" on Flashquake.

Stay tuned. From what I hear, there are more stories in the publishing pipeline.

Land of Enchantment

2008-03-01T08:59:00.000-08:00

From Albuquerque we drive north in our rented Ford Escort, playing “The Vanishing Breed” over and over.

It’s cloudy but warm and the landscape looks a lot like California at first, but as we follow the Turquoise Trail into the hills, everything changes. The ground rises, rocky and dotted with sage brush. We round a bend and everything is green. A forest of small trees spreads out before us.

All the while Robbie Robertson and the Red Road Ensemble work their magic.

The workplace is all but forgotten.

The land is an odd combination of very flat and very hilly. We stop along the roadside to retrieve some snacks from the trunk and see our first arroyo on the other side of a barbed-wire fence where three cows graze.

We’re not in any hurry. We can do whatever we want. It’s an uncommon feeling, and we like it.

That was my first impression of New Mexico, a state my wife and I have visited many times since. I'm thinking fondly of the Land of Enchantment right now because I just got word from the Blue Mesa Review that I'm one of five finalists in its annual short story contest.

Wish me luck!

The Debate Continues

2008-02-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

Another writer I respect (who has not read Eat, Pray, Love) is of the opinion that making a book deal in advance can change your perspective.

Her guess: "What you focus on, what you write down, is not as organic, as intuitive, as just fully experiencing in the moment."

She imagines the writer would have to feel "pressure to make a 'good' or certain kind of book."

Which makes me think of Larry David's reaction when the Seinfeld series was picked up. He was, he has said, terrified. How was he going to come up with a whole season's worth of stories?

Gilbert must have felt the same sort of pressure as she traveled through Italy, India, and Indonesia. Could she really turn her experiences and her reflections into a book anyone would want to read?

Let's face it, though, deadlines and commitments are how an awful lot of writing gets done.

But I suppose the real issue here is that we're talking about a memoir.

"What then is the difference here between memoir and reportage?" Gretchen wonders.

I'd say that Gilbert was in effect reporting on herself. Kind of like writing a travel book with a unique theme and highly personal perspective.

She contrived to bare her soul and, in large part, succeeded.

She may have skipped over some things and shrouded others -- either to protect herself or please her readers -- but nobody tells the whole truth.

Anthropology, Physics, and the Memoir

2008-01-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

A close friend started reading Eat, Pray, Love -- one of the most engaging books I've read in years -- and couldn't make it past page 87. His chief complaint: the author had secured a book deal before setting forth on her journey of self-discovery.

"After reading that, everything felt manipulated and controlled and fake. This wasn’t a personal, see-where-the-wind-takes-me journey. This was a planned-out literary event hashed out beforehand in New York," he writes in his highly entertaining blog.

I was stunned.

Every trip I've ever taken has been planned to one degree or another, and yet my experiences have always been unique, spontaneous, and real. Or so it seemed.

Why begrudge Elizabeth Gilbert her book deal? How else was she going to get to Italy, India, and Indonesia?

How did Richard Goodman find the wherewithal to write French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France? He doesn't say. Great book, though.

The problem with such books, I suppose, is that they are all a bit self-conscious. Of course that's also their greatest strength. Gilbert's strength is that she watches herself and others very closely.

Anthropologists tell us that the mere act of observing changes the thing you're observing. I gather that's even true in particle physics, where particles behave differently when you train a high-speed camera on them. (See What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole.)

If that's the case, then everything we read or say or observe has to be considered a bit unreal.

Just enjoy it, I say.

The Truth

2008-01-11T10:32:00.000-08:00

My friend's father prefers non-fiction books.

"You know why?" he said to me. "Because they're true."

I let it go.

I happen to prefer fiction. You know why? Because, in some ways at least, it's truer.

Writers of both fiction and non-fiction use a lot of the same narrative techniques and have to make a lot of the same choices as they craft their stories -- what to leave in, what to leave out; where to start, where to stop -- so that in the end the difference between a novel and, say, a memoir can be a little hazy.

One of my favorite memoirs, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, was famously exposed as, well ... fiction. Turns out Frey had exaggerated everything that happened to him. And I could understand why. It made a better story. His defense: It was still true on an emotional level.

I can buy that. But he should have called the book what it was: a novel.

On the other hand, even the best biographies and histories and accounts of current events aren't really true. Why? Because writers have to make choices. They can't include everything, but everything they leave out makes the story a little less true.

Everything they add changes the truth of what they've already written.

Novelists make the same choices, of course, but they have more freedom. They aren't hampered by an inability to get all the facts. They can make them up. Yet the best fiction ends up being as true-to-life as the best non-fiction. More so in many cases.

Hip Mamma

2008-01-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

My little sister has done it again.

(Okay, she's really my sister-in-law, but I think of her as the younger sister I never had.)

What she's done is publish another essay. This one in Hip Mama, "a magazine bursting with political commentary and ribald tales from the front lines of motherhood."

What I like about her latest creation, "Clear Blue (but not so) Easy," is that it's written with style and courage.

It's very personal and very real.

Check it out.

The Best Ones

2007-12-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

Here are my choices for the best of 2007 ...

Best song I never would have heard if not for the iPod ads: "1234," by Feist.

Best song I never would have heard if not for the TV show John from Cincinnati: "Johnny Appleseed," by Joe Strummer.

Best continuation of a brilliant career: Magic, by Bruce Springsteen.

Best movie I haven't seen yet: Juno.

Quirky comedy that deserved better: The Darjeeling Limited.

Breakout paperback sensation: Eat, Pray, Love.

Evocative book title: Like You'd Understand, Anyway.

Best essay by a much admired family member: "Testing: One, Two, Three?"

Best blog: Chimichangas at Sunset.

Cutest dog ever: Bodie.

Best new TV series: John from Cincinnati.

Best magazine article: Fast Company's November cover story: "This Mechanic Can Get You 100 MPG (Why Can't Detroit?)."

Best novel I've read in the past year: The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford.

Best road trip: Along the coast to Santa Barbara.

Woman of the year (this year and every year): Joanne Riske.

What to Believe

2007-12-01T10:18:00.000-08:00

Janet thinks I'm skeptical -- one of the most skeptical people she's ever run into.

It's always interesting when people make observations like that about you. You get to compare how they perceive you with how you perceive yourself. The truth is, I have always been a very trusting person, and I choose to remain trusting, generally speaking, in spite of everything.

But I know why Janet thinks I'm skeptical. It's because I argue with her on matters of faith.

Janet has become a serious student of the Bible again after years of exploring other paths. I'm more interested in the other paths.

I no longer call myself a Christian because I think it's a loaded term, loaded with preconceptions, and I'm trying to move beyond that -- beyond my own preconceptions and the confining concepts of others.

(As an aside, I had the great good fortune of studying under the late Dr. Gordan Frazee, a self-described Christian mystic, at Linfield College in Oregon. While he had a deep knowledge of the Bible and all it's possible interpretations, his most lasting lesson was simply the way he lived his life. One of his great virtues was not trying to make his students see things his way -- a virtue I'm still striving toward. Not that I have any students, but you know what I mean.)

When Janet talks about the Bible, I tend to point out what I see as lapses in logic and flawed reasoning. She, on the other hand, seems to think of logic as a tired argument that no longer works for her.

The surprise here is that I don't really disagree with her on that point (if I understood her correctly). Logic and reason will only take you so far.

Janet doesn't believe in hell.

I don't either.

She says she came to that conclusion from studying the Bible.

I came to the same conclusion, not through the Bible and not through reason. Some things you just know, deep down, and that's what I trust. More than the Bible. More than reason.

No Particular Order

2007-11-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

For the man and woman who brought me into the world.
For the sisters who taught me how to play tennis.
For the surgeon who removed my appendix before it burst.
For the dentist who capped my broken tooth.
For the master who taught me yoga.
For the mechanic who fixes my car.
For the singer who sings that song I like.
For the friends who lift me up when I'm down.
For the woman who still loves me after all these years.
Thanks.

Don't Stop Now

2007-11-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

We spread a blanket off to one side of the boat launch, under some trees. Island Lake, in Shelton, Washington, is surrounded by small private homes, and this is the only public access. Since it's still early in the season and the homeowners tend to take the lake for granted, there are no boats or skiers out.

It's 1972, and we're both seventeen.

That's how the story begins. The story "Don't Stop Now" in Hobart.

Hobart is one of my favorite literary journals, and the story appears this month in the online edition.

It's basically a distillation of a novel I started writing in 1972 when I was 17. Two hundred forty-four pages down to five. Reader's Digest, eat your heart out.

Like many first novels, mine was awful (embarrassingly so) and now languishes in the back of a closet, where it belongs. The short story, on the other hand, is pretty darn good. An editor at Esquire called it "a pleasure to read," even if it wasn't really appropriate for the magazine.

More importantly, Hobart loved it.

So, don't stop now; hop on over to Hobart and check it out.

Testing: One, Two, Three?

2007-10-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not the target audience for Literary Momma. It is, after all, "A Literary Magazine for the Maternally Inclined."

Can a man be maternally inclined, or would we call that paternally inclined? Are they different? I couldn't say. I'm not even a parent. So why do I find myself reading Literary Momma today?

Because of a great article called "Testing: One, Two, Three?" by Gretchen Clark.

To me, this piece of creative nonfiction does what great literature is supposed to do: Put you in someone else's shoes and let you experience what it's like to be them. Even if you're not like them. Even if you're someone of a different gender, someone in completely different circumstances.

In just 14 paragraphs, "Testing: One, Two, Three?" gave me a vivid glimpse into the complex and conflicting emotions of motherhood.

What's more, I now feel like I know Gretchen Clark, even though I've already known her for more than 30 years.

She's my sister-in-law.

Writer's Profile

2007-10-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Childhood Ambition: Be the best writer who ever lived. (I was 10 and had never heard of Shakespeare.)

Little-Known Fact: Had first story published (on a mimeograph machine) when in the fourth grade.

Honors: Won first place in a feature-writing contest in high school, despite horrible spelling.

Influences: John Knowles, Earnest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Tallent, Milan Kundera.

Proudest Moment So Far: Having my first short story published in the Beloit Fiction Journal. (I have another story coming out in Hobart next month that I'm equally proud of.)

Inspiration: Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward, who told me she collected 120 rejections before her first story was published. (It does pay to be persistent.)

Most Encouraging Note: "I think you're a good writer and I liked what I read ... I cannot flatter where writing is concerned." - L.H., SoHo Press.

Most Discouraging Note: "I'm afraid this is nowhere near the novel I had hoped for." - L.H., SoHo Press.

Best Advice from a Fellow Writer: "Diversify your emotional investments." - Greg Bardsley.

Goal: Be more playful.

Eat, Pray, Love

2007-09-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

For both style and substance, it's hard to imagine a better read that Eat, Pray, Love.

The best-selling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert is billed as "One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia."

Along the way, there's no shortage of candor and comedy, confusion and crises. But clarity is never far behind.

Check it out. You won't be disappointed.

Joshua Tree

2007-09-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

The desert is full of things you can’t hold on to — light and heat and sand that slips through your fingers like friendships you once had. But if you’re looking for a sense of permanence, the desert is the place to go.

California’s two deserts — the Mojave and the Colorado — come together at Joshua Tree National Monument, 140 miles east of L.A. If you go there, you’ll see what I mean.

Some of the Joshua trees have been around for hundreds of years and are now nearly 50 feet tall. (They look like overgrown cacti.) But it’s the immovable boulders and massive rock formations jutting up from the desert floor that really make you feel as if nothing ever changes here.

It’s not true, of course. On some of the rocks you’ll find petroglyphs left by an ancient Indian civilization we know little about — experts aren’t even sure if the etchings were a form of writing or just drawings. Even so. Stand in the shade of a boulder, put your hand on its pebbled surface — still cool in the noonday heat — and you’ll know there’s at least one thing you can hold on to.

Climbers from all over the country come here, to the Wonderland of Rocks, to test themselves on innumerable ascents, but you don’t need ropes or carabiners or gymnast’s chalk to appreciate the Wonderland. Although this maze of granite boulders covers 12 square miles, you can get a good feel for it on an easy-to-follow trail of little more than a mile.

But first you may want to get your bearings by driving through this 850-square-mile preserve. Gently winding roads will lead you from the high-desert beauty of the Mojave to the immense low-desert grandeur of the Pinto Basin in the Colorado. To really get the lay of the land, your first stop should be Keys View — if not the highest point in the monument, as least the highest you can get to on a paved road. From here you can see snow-capped Mount San Gorgonio, Palm Springs, and the Salton Sea. On a clear day you can even spot Signal Mountain, just over the Mexican border, 95 miles away.

You won’t get a real feel for the desert, though, until you leave the roads behind. When you can no longer see pavement or campers or even fellow hikers — that’s when you know you’re in the desert.

It’s hot and you’d better carry plenty of water.

On the trail the only sounds you’ll hear are the crunch of rocks under your boots and, if you’re lucky, the wind riffling through your hair. When you stop, and the air is still, the silence is like a ringing in your ears.

Two more things you can’t hold on to: silence and peace.

We felt it on our way to the Lost Palms Oasis. The trail begins at Cottonwood Spring and leads you out past the Mastodon Mine, over rolling hills and through dry washes. It’s four miles to Lost Palms, and before you get there you realize the desert is also full of things you wouldn’t want to hold on to — prickly pear cactus, whiptail lizards, catclaw shrubs, and rattlesnakes. (Not that we saw any rattlers, but you should carry a snakebite kit just in case.) Still, the variety of cactus and birds and other creatures is astonishing.

The Oasis is a cluster of fan palms at the bottom of a deep ravine. It looks like a long way down, but it doesn’t take long (even coming back up). Among the palms, we pass another hiker who says, “What, no pool to dive into?” There’s clearly water here somewhere, but it’s all below the surface.

We sit in the sand, our backs against a sloping chunk of granite, and enjoy our lunch — bananas, grapes, sandwiches, and cookies — in the shade of the palms. A breeze rustles through the ravine. It’s nice here. We decide to let the desert hold on to us for a while.

Al is ...

2007-08-29T23:22:00.000-07:00

Al is sipping a tall decafe mocha with whip.

Al is writing about "high-semantic storage" and other things he doesn't fully understand.

Al is eating a drumstick at his desk and trying to imagine world peace. The drumstick is really good.

Al is reading Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (His friend Karen Croft did a lot of the research.)

Al is going downstairs for an iced latte.

Al is on a conference call with a bunch of very forward-looking people.

Al is thinking he'd like to be in Maui, bobbing in the waves of Napili Bay right about now.

Al is taking Bodie for a quick walk in the courtyard.

Al is trying to arrange an interview but his subject doesn't have the bandwidth for that right now.

Al is ready for the weekend. Oh, wait, this is only Wednesday.

Al is chowing down on leftover pizza, his workday done.

Al is at the yoga center.

Al is.

Are You Precient?

2007-08-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

Here's an outtake from a fascinating conversation I had awhile ago with Steve Rubin, one of our top engineers ...

"I think that scientists in general are not acting like scientists anymore, but are acting more like religious figures, with their belief in some stuff and rejection of anything that doesn't fit within their doctrines -- for example, paranormal effects. I used to reject the paranormal, too. You know, 'That's BS.'

"I had the standard skeptical thing until I did some programming work for Dean Radin. He's considered a paranormal or psychic researcher. He's a Ph.D., scientist, statistical expert, skeptic, and what he does is he goes around and he repeats the experiments that people claim are demonstrating paranormal effects. Someone says, 'The following proves a paranormal effect,' and he says, 'Bullshit. Let's see for ourselves.'

"I was his programmer, building his experiments, and it was quite convincing. Here's one example; I wouldn't have believed it could work.

"Are you prescient? Can you see the future? Some people think they can, but they can't quantify it. They can't prove it. There are a lot of people, by the way, who believe in these effects, but they can't really defend it because someone can always say, 'Oh, you just got a hint from somewhere.'

"What Radin did was he got a collection of pictures. Some of them were 'calm' pictures as he called them. A picture of a spoon. A picture of a flower. Then he had 'difficult' pictures. A picture of a deformed face. A picture of a bloody accident. Pictures of people having sex. Pictures to get your blood boiling. He would then randomly flash these pictures on a screen in front of a subject. Not only that, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, he would play the most annoying, grating, screeching sound. And he had you hooked up to a number of devices, measuring your blood pressure, heart rate, and stuff like that.

"All he told the subjects was, 'We're measuring your response to these pictures.' and he'd show a few dozen pictures. Sure enough, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, the curves jumped. People were not happy. And when the calm pictures hit the screen the biometrics just continued normally. Except for one interesting thing. Before the difficult pictures hit the screen, people's rates would already start to climb. People knew. People are prescient.

"I programmed this thing, and I know I did it right. In fact, I've been programming computers for almost 40 years now. Since high school. I have never in my life had my code scrutinized so heavily as this code. First of all, the random decision to show a calm or annoying picture had to be made immediately before it happened. They didn't want it made ahead of time so someone could argue that it was stored in the computer and somehow detectable. They also wanted to make sure that the amount of code that was executed for the the two paths, calm versus difficult, was the same length of time so no one could detect a little delay.

"They went on and on with this level of scrutiny of the code, checking everything. But there's no doubt about it. Statistical analysis bears it out, as well as just an eyeballing of the data. When a calm picture is coming, people stay calm. When the difficult picture is coming, people know before that thing hits the screen, before that sound comes out of the speaker. They start to get tense ahead of time. Everyone does it (not just the people who claim to be prescient). We can document that all people are prescient, even though they don't know it.

"Prescience? Intuition? These I believe are real phenomena, and we could have endless discussions about why I think they're real. I'm not saying it's real because I've seen the aliens, or taken too many drugs, or something like that. There are some real phenomena out there. And there are many people with theories. My basic take on it is that it's just a phenomenon we haven't learned to measure yet. No one believed in electricity before it was invented. Or radio waves. How magical is that?

"At each point in time we think, 'We know it all. We're done now.' And this is what I complain about with scientists today. They say, 'We have all our answers.' But we don't have all our answers. Did you know that the physical constants are not constant? The speed of light is not constant. Yet scientists blithely treat these things as if they're constants. The history of their values shows that they change, and this is not just due to better measuring equipment. If you go into a lab today and try to measure them ten times in a row, you'll get ten different answers. They're all within a fraction of a percent, or something like that, but they're not constants ... it varies more than the equipment's margin of error. All sorts of things that we think are true are not. But we gloss over that stuff because it's just too hard to believe.

"There is lots out there; we just can't detect it yet."

The Time of My Life

2007-08-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

Thirty-one years ago today, in a rain-soaked park in Oregon, Joanne and I were huddled under a small shelter with our friends and families.

I was wearing a black velvet suit I'd picked up at the Squire Shop in the Lancaster Mall. Joanne was wearing a long white Gunny Sack dress and looked fantastic.

College buddies played "Here Comes the Sun" on guitar and a borrowed pump organ.

Eleven months earlier, Joanne and I had been among half a dozen students who gathered in Dr. Frazee's office for his course in the Development of Christian Thought. By coincidence, we showed up in similar ski sweaters on the same day, and Joanne was amazed when it kept happening, week after week, on different days.

She never suspected that I might have seen her on campus earlier and run back to my dorm to change.

What can I say? Sometimes fate can use a helping hand.

In the park, with the rain still coming down, it was Dr. Frazee -- a bald, robust, and joyous man -- who stood before us now with the power to pronounce us husband and wife.

Joanne had earned her art degree a couple of months earlier and was working in the office of Chuck Colvin Ford in McMinnville (home of Linfield College, where we met). I still had a semester to go and had a summer job sorting the empty bottles that came back to the Coca-Cola plant in Salem. Nothing about our future was set except one thing ...

We placed plain gold bands around each other's fingers and promised to love each other for the rest of our lives.

Mom and Apple Pie

2007-08-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

When she was alive, my mother made what I considered the best apple pie in the world.

The key to its flaky crust (even on the bottom) was in her fingers. She never used a recipe but knew by the feel of the dough when it was just right.

"When it's too wet you feel it's gooey," she told me. "If it's too dry, you can't roll it out. Then it crumbles too much."

She was 63 then and I was 23, interviewing her for an article I was writing for The Community Press, where I had landed my first job as a reporter.

"I have the feeling -- how it's supposed to be," she said.

This small German woman had never even tasted pie before coming to America in 1952.

"I learned how to make it in my second year here," she said. "A neighbor girl came over and showed me how."

She had watched the girl -- "I don't remember her name, but she was a very nice girl" -- as she carefully measured the ingredients.

"I couldn't read the recipe. That's why I had to see it -- what she put in," my mother recalled. "That's why I never used a recipe. I couldn't read English."

At the time she could hardly speak English, and the neighbor girl had to show her, rather than tell her, how to make the pie.

"She measured everything. At first I measured everything, too, but then I just used my own judgment."

If you asked my mom, "How much flour?" or "How much sugar?" she would say, "Until it looks right."

I could never master it, but I did pick up a little secret for anyone who aspires to flaky-crust perfection.

"What makes the best pie is to use lard and shortening together," she told me.

This was not something the neighbor girl taught her, though. She discovered it on her own.

"I didn't have enough shortening one time," she said, "so I had to use half lard."

Don't have any lard on hand?

Get some.

Lyrics Essay

2007-07-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

Bob said business men, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

Bruce said tell me what I see when I look in your eyes. Is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

Mark said I dreamed your dream for you. Now your dream is real. How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

Van said everybody feels so determined not to feel anybody else's pain.

Bruce said, remember, the soul of the universe willed a world and it appeared.

Rickie said the world is turning faster than it did when I was young.

John said it's time to go home and I ain't even done with the night.

Van said no one's making no commitments to anybody but themselves.

Bob said my love winks, she does not bother. She knows too much to argue or to judge.

Another Bob said ain't it funny how the night moves?

Patti said I've been lost and I've been found, been lifted up to the gates of heaven and put back down.

Sting said I never made promises lightly and there have been some that I've broken, but I swear in the days still left we'll walk in fields of gold.

Nick said what's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

Bob said I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Jewel said in the end only kindness matters.

And Van said you shall take me strongly in your arms again and I will not remember that I ever felt the pain.

Tina said all fear will be gone when we reach the shores of Avalon.

Post Cards from the Edge

2007-06-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

This is the story of a road trip we took back in May of 1991 — to Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon — as told through post cards and letters to friends. A trip both awe-inspiring and life-threatening.

SUNDAY
From Carson City, our first overnight stop, we drive straight through the high, flat desert to Ely. On the horizon all around us are mountains dusted with snow. The only shadows are cast by fluffy white clouds with flat, dark bottoms. Very surreal. They look so close, like just a high ceiling. I guess it has something to do with our altitude, which is somewhere around 7,000 feet. Anyway the shadows leave the plain streaked black. It’s beautiful but my butt hurts. At least we have cruise control.

MONDAY
Here at last. The Nevada desert was just a prelude, the casinos a weak attempt to distract us. This is what we came for — the red rock canyons of Utah — and we’re in awe. As we drove along the Virgin River this afternoon, we had to hunker down and peer up through the windshield to find the tops of the canyon walls all around us — as much as 4,000 feet straight up. Joanne said, “Too bad we don’t have a sun roof or a convertible.” Then she thought better of it. Falling rocks, you know.

TUESDAY
Zion is like Yosemite with color. I might have made that up but Joanne assures me she read it to me from a guidebook before we ever left California. It’s true, though. In fact, Zion makes Yosemite look like a rough draft. We ran into a bit of a rainy patch on the trail to Hidden Canyon this morning. It’s really coming down now, but we’re back in our cabin and there’s a fireplace, so everything is just fine.

WEDNESDAY
“Just because the trail’s there doesn’t mean it’s safe.” That bit of advice came from a friendly waiter at breakfast when he found out we’d been hiking in Hidden Canyon in the rain yesterday. “If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have warned against it. We had a helicopter rescue out there Saturday. We lost a park ranger out there last year when it was dry.” Not to worry. The weather appears to be improving, and we promise to be careful.

THURSDAY
One of the first things you notice here — aside from how much bluer the sky is than you’ve ever known it to be — is how much the sound of wind or running water is amplified in a canyon. Here at Bryce, the Paria River is dry now, but the wind can be very strong and there are other sounds — this morning we were in a narrow canyon photographing two natural bridges, and the sound of a raven’s wings beating the thin, dry air startled and amazed us. The bird flew from one wall to the other and back again in search of a comfortable perch, and if you saw the same thing in a movie you’d say the sound technician got it wrong. It was too loud to be real. But there we were.

The old photos in the lodge are really something. Tourists used to arrive in long touring limousines, often with open roofs, that brought them straight from the railway station in Cedar City. (Union Pacific built the lodge in 1924.) The women wore raccoon coats. The place still has a sort of rustic grandeur, but the staff no longer gathers to sing to departing guests as they did in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

Saw five deer grazing in the field at dusk. They let us get close enough to hear them tear clumps of grass from the ground.

FRIDAY
I don’t know what it is about the dining room here, but I always feel happy when we sit down for a meal. We’re not ourselves anymore. We’re some couple from the twenties, I suppose, since that’s when the lodge was built, and we’ve just come out on the Union Pacific, all the way from Connecticut or New Hampshire.

The food is quite good — especially the Southwest chicken breasts they serve at dinner — and we always pay with traveler’s cheques, which seems to add to the illusion that we came from far, far away in the days before credit cards.

Maybe it’s the exposed beams of the ceiling, the two stone fireplaces, the big windows with their small rectangular panes. Even from a distance the imperfections of the glass are visible — the uneven thickness of the panes. Up close, you can see that some have tiny air bubbles in them.

Or maybe it’s the uniforms. Waitresses wear white aprons over salmon-colored dresses with white cuffs on their short sleeves. Waiters wear bow ties, suspenders, and aprons.

Navajo rugs hang on the wood-paneled walls, and the overhead lights are wrapped in wrought iron with a pine-tree motif. The chairs are made of tree branches with the bark still on them.

It all combines to take you back. In our case, to a time before we were born.

SATURDAY
When we arrived at the North Rim, the park had only been open three days, and it was easy to see why: there were still huge snow drifts along the road. That, along with the white and leafless aspens in among the pines, really gives the place the look of winter rather than spring. The man at the registration desk said, “You’re staying four days? What are you going to do here for four days?” Well, laundry, for one thing. There’s just no getting away from dirty socks.

SUNDAY
Hiked to Widforss Point today, a ten-mile round-trip through forest with numerous canyon overlooks, the most striking view being at Widforss, naturally. It took us three hours to get there, but it was worth it. Didn’t see any of the Kaibab squirrels that live on the North Rim (and nowhere else), but we did spot a screech owl, a deer, and several short-horned lizards.

WEDNESDAY
If I’m calm in emergencies, it’s because I never believe anything bad can happen to me. But later, sometimes, I see how, if we’d done just one thing differently — if we’d made one more mistake — things could have been really bad instead of merely miserable.

Yesterday we hiked down into the Grand Canyon, all the way to Roaring Springs — a drop in elevation of between three and four thousand feet, which of course we had to make up on the return trip.

It took us two hours and twenty-five minutes going down, and they say you should allow twice as long to get back. Not a pleasant thought. We had already drunk half our water supply.

Joanne at least had a hat. I rigged something up with a handkerchief as a headband.

After lunch we decided, to be safe, we’d better fill our water bottles at the pump house. (We didn’t want to take water from the stream because we had no purification tablets.) But there was no trail.

We tried going up the bank. We tried following the water pipe along the stream. We were getting nowhere and expending a lot of energy in the process. Finally, we sat down again and Joanne started drinking long greedy drinks from her water bottle.

“I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

We started up the trail, but didn’t get far before Joanne found a rock to sit on in a small patch of shade and started guzzling what was left of her water.

“We’re not going to make it. I can’t go on. I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

My first thought: We’d be fine if you’d just go easy on the water. But I didn’t say that, and I’m glad I didn’t because it could have been our undoing. Instead, I said, “We’ve got two choices: We can go back and get more water from the stream, or we can go on with what we have left.”

“I can’t go on. I don’t feel well, Al.”

We put all the water we had into two bottles, and I took the other two down to the stream. Giardia was the least of my concerns at this point. In about 20 minutes, I was back. Joanne had drunk most of one bottle already, but was feeling better. In fact, I had trouble keeping up with her. We made it to the top in only three and a half hours. We even had time for a shower and a nap before our dinner reservation. All seemed well.

Then, as we finished our meal, Joanne started to feel feverish and then chilled in turns.

The medics came to our room, took her vital signs, and conferred with a doctor by phone. The diagnosis: sinus infection. The treatment: rest, take aspirin, and drink lots of water. The irony: her sinus trouble was probably caused or at least aggrevated by our rapid rise from the canyon.

In any case, to this day, Joanne carries water with her wherever she goes.

Flash-Flood Warnings

2007-06-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

Another moment in time. July 1992. We're sitting at the end of a dock on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. Night is falling—and a few drops of rain as well. There are about fifty ski boats and a scattering of sailboats anchored here, all pointing straight across the lake, bows to the tide.

Tugging on the lake is a full moon, though we can't see it.

Behind us the sky is blue and purple, but to the north it's black with clouds. Sheets of lightning flash every few minutes, but there's no thunder, not like this afternoon.

We like it here. The beach is private, but we have a key to the gate because we're staying at the Cottage Inn. A circle of six cottages in a pine grove, the inn is run as a bed and breakfast. In the main building, where breakfast is served, there's also a living room with a fireplace, a stereo, and a small TV. Earlier, the All-Star Game (AL 13, NL 6) was interrupted twice by the Emergency Broadcast System issuing flash-flood warnings around the area.

Despite the weather, we have asked to stay an extra day.

Artificial Intelligence

2007-05-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Ever been frustrated to the point of screaming because you couldn't get some gadget to do what it was designed to do? Of course you have. We all have.

Then, at the height of your outrage, some helpful bystander -- your father-in-law, perhaps -- will say, "You have to be smarter than the machine."

Right.

I once took a sledge hammer to a wristwatch/stopwatch/lap-counter that somehow thought I wanted it to beep every day at 4 a.m.

It wasn't smart enough to run.

Now I see that the processing power of your average desktop computer is expected to surpass that of the human brain by 2022.

Really?

On one hand, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It's been 10 years since a computer first defeated the world's reigning chess champion. You remember IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in 1997, don't you?

(Yeah, me neither, but I looked it up.)

The funny thing is, with computers having gotten twice as fast every couple of years, you'd think they'd be able to do a lot more by now. Like recognize your voice. I have better luck with our five-month-old puppy than any computer I've tried to talk to on the phone.

Now, I'm no engineer, but I get to rub shoulders with some of the best where I work, and I was pleased to see this quote from James Gosling:

"Chess is remarkably simple from a machine's point of view. But to humans it appears complex. Similarly some things that appear simple are far more complex than we perceive them to be."

He noted, for example, that understanding speech is very different from merely recognizing it. From that perspective, a three-year-old child outshines the best computer.

We'll see where they are in 2022, but I wouldn't bet against the brain.

How Sweet Life Can Be

2007-05-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

On the beach at Hanalei Bay we listened to the whoosh and sizzle of gentle waves as they slapped the shore and washed through the course brown sand.

We were not the first ones on the beach—a lone woman and two other couples had beaten us there—but everyone was quiet, said good-morning in passing, and otherwise kept their distance.

We could see tiny fish in the ankle-deep water that stretched a good distance off shore before it got any deeper, and on the sand little translucent crabs moved like dustballs in the wind.

We walked inland along the bay as far as the big black boulders (they looked like giant briquettes) and watched black crabs as big as your hand show off their skill as rock climbers. We were surprised to see them actually jump from one rock to the next.

It was the first morning of our first real vacation. The first time we flew somewhere together. The first time we didn't stay with family. Hers or mine. It was also the first time I realized just how sweet life could be.

It's been nearly 20 years, but I can still bring back the feeling if I try.

The Red Belt

2007-05-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

My wife and I recently returned from 15 days of intensive martial-arts training in the Arizona desert, near Sedona. Eat breakfast, train. Eat lunch, train. Eat dinner, train. Go to bed, start again.

A couple of times we even trained before breakfast.

Several times along the way we decided we didn't want to do any more, but we kept going anyway.

Earned red belts in the end. Never mind the white, yellow, and blue belts that usually come before that in Dahn Mu Do (similar to Tai Chi). Not that we went to Sedona seeking belts. We didn't even know about them until we were there. And we didn't particularly like the idea that there would be a test at the end of our stay. This was our vacation, for God's sake.

But of course once we learned about the red belts we couldn't very well go home without one, could we? Not on your life.

Best part was the stuff we did with swords. Wooden swords that we gave names to, carried everywhere, and slept with every night.

It took us days to master the Vortex Sword form, and I still messed up when it was my turn on stage. I left out a move and ended with my back to the audience. Damn. A quick, impromptu move set things right, but still.

The whole Vortex thing takes about three minutes to perform and seems ridiculously easy now.

That's just the way of things, I guess.

Then again I still need to refine my footwork, and there's a new twist our local instructor shared with us -- twirling the sword like a batton to change directions with flair.

I'm working on it.

Get Back

2007-05-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

Sunrise, mountains, forest, stream.

Smile.

Surveyor, construction site, small town, big city, electric power grid.

Traffic light, green.

I am Starbucks. Hope has a voice. Can you hear me now? Cingular has the fewest dropped calls. Three-car collision, Willow at Bayfront. Bed, Bath & Beyond Now Open. Freeway entrance. YouTube. MySpace. LinkedIn. Blogger. Backup on the Dumbarton. Lane ends, merge left. Get Naked and Rule the World. Office space available. As Funds Leverage Up, Fears of Reckoning Rise. Metering lights are on. Morning Edition. Under new management. Al, 7 Days Left to Use Your Personal Shopping Day. Right lane must exit. Emergency Call 9-1-1. No parking anytime. Eyewitness News at 11. Mystery Spot. Explorer, Navigator, Voyager, Ranger, Wrangler, Land Rover. This Bitch Hauls Ass. Life, liberty, and the pursuit.

Traffic light, red.

"... Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson, you're all fakes, run to your mansions. Come around, we'll kick your asses."

Paved road, dirt road, forest, stream, dusk.

Deep breath.

Smile.

Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight

2007-04-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

I was looking for inspiration and came across the story of Lasse Viren.

Remember him? Viren was the guy who stumbled and fell halfway through the Olympic 10,000-meter final in 1972. Any chance the 23-year-old police officer from Finland had of winning a medal appeared to be gone.

He calmly got up and started running again.

Sportswriters consider it one of the great comebacks of all time because Viren not only caught up with the other runners, he passed them all to win the gold.

And he set a world record in the process.

Amazing.

What does that have to do with you, my friend? I wanted to remind you, in case you might have forgotten, that the same spirit resides in you.

Unintended Consequences

2007-04-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

When I was very young, maybe five years old, my mother asked me what I wanted to be.

This was in the living room of the house on Satsup Street (still the setting for occasional dreams, since I spent so many of my formative years there). A number a people were around and I was vaguely aware of an older brother answering the same question.

I think I gave the same answer he did, though I don't remember what that was. Fireman, perhaps. I had never thought about it before.

My mother said, "Wouldn't you like to be a pastor?"

Being an agreeable child, I said yes.

She then told everyone what I had said, and I knew right away that I would never be a pastor.

I still find it funny how that worked. I was an agreeable child, as I said, and eager to please, but I felt tricked. This was so clearly what she wanted; it had nothing to do with me.

I did end up being a serious student of religion in college, but I'd be damned if I was going to be a professional.

The Amoral of the Story

2007-04-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

"I don't believe in anything," a colleague once told me.

I didn't believe him.

"I'm serious. I don't. When I sit down and try to decide what I believe ... there's nothing," he said. "It's hard to decide on anything."

"Of course, because that means you have to commit yourself."

"That's right. And what if you find out you were wrong?" he said. "What if you live your whole life and ..."

"You can always change your mind," I said.

I'm afraid that was a little too blithe for my coworker, though.

"What about after the Spanish Inquisition, after you've burned all these people at the stake? What do you say then: 'Oh, we changed our minds'?"

"Never mind," I said, in the sort of pinched, old-woman voice you hear in Monty Python reruns.

"You've got all these crispy critters on your hands," he said.

An important point about the dangers of belief, I suppose, but far removed from any choice we would have to make that day.

Soon the conversation shifted and my colleague started telling me about something he'd seen on TV -- an interview with a mass murderer, long imprisoned.

(I say colleague rather than a friend because Pete made it quite clear that he didn't like me. He once called me pious, and he didn't mean it as a complement. I pray to God I don't sound pious now.)

I had missed the interview (intentionally) but wondered what Pete thought.

"He was really bizarre. He was ... well, he was completely amoral."

"Kind of like you, huh?"

"No, Al."

"Well, you don't believe in anything. Isn't that what amoral is?"

"It's not the same thing," he said.

"I think you believe in more than you know."

Another Sister's Perspective

2007-04-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

My sister Irma remembers being impressed with our father because he taught himself to read and write in English without much help and doesn't know how in the world he ever did that.

She remembers coming home to see him sitting at the kitchen table reading the World Book encyclopedia. She thinks he probably read the whole series cover-to-cover. He must have, she says, because of all the many times she saw him doing that.

He was so hungry for knowledge, he read constantly.

He always knew everything that was going on all over the world, she recalls, and he used to get disgusted with Americans because nobody knew anything. He'd ask them who the leader of Germany was and nobody knew. He couldn't get over that.

She thought he would have been a great politician, but of course that was not to be.

Another thing she remembers is that Dad couldn't stand it when people sat around in bathrobes, like she used to do, until 10 o'clock in the morning. It about drove him crazy. He just did not like that look. He felt you should get dressed and eat and start the day dressed.

On the (somewhat) humorous side, Irma recalls, he hated seafood -- any kind of seafood. It was almost as if he thought it was a sin to eat any of it. Anyway, one time she was fixing razor clams, dipping them in flour and frying them like cutlets. He said, "Oh, those look good" and she said, "I'll give you a plate."

So he sat down and started eating. "This is good," he said. "What is it?"

Not being able to lie to him, she told him -- kind of jokingly, like she'd pulled one over on him.

He picked up the plate and flung it across the room.

He was very upset with her for deceiving him, so that was the first and last time she ever did that to him.

A Sister's Perspective

2007-03-31T07:44:00.000-07:00

My sister Hanna says she did not get to know our father well. After all, she did not live at home much of the time. In her teens, she worked as a live-in housekeeper.

Here's what she does remember ...

She remembers talking him into buying a typewriter when she was in school, promising to type his letters for him. She does not remember typing any for him. He never asked.

She remembers that Dad did not make life easy on himself. He had a car in the garage but walked to work.

She remembers that Dad did not like his daughters to wear lipstick -- so they would put it on while on their way to school. Hanna got caught, though. He saw her his way to work, or maybe it was coming back, and she had not wiped her lips hard enough.

She did not ask our parents to attend school activities, because she was embarrassed to be seen with them. (I remember feeling the same way because our parents were different from other parents, foreign.)

She remembers that Dad did not like things broken down. Shortly after she and her husband purchased their house, he drove down with a trunk full of stair forms and put in new front steps. Those steps are still in use today, 40-some years later.

About My Father

2007-03-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

My father was born in Russia, to German parents, and grew up in Poland.

After his father died from cancer and his mother remarried, he was kicked out of the house. His stepfather already had enough kids. He was about 12.

My mother was not his first choice. He was turned down by one of her sisters before he proposed to her.

He worked for a railroad before the war and drove an ammunition truck during the war.

On the battlefield, a dying soldier called out to him to come and pray with him. He did, and it was a good thing because the next bomb hit right where he had been.

After the war, he worked in a foundry.

He brought the family to the United States in 1952 and immediately regretted it, but there was no way to go back.

His first job in this country was shoveling manure.

The cousin who sponsored our family couldn't understand why he was in such a hurry pay his debt, leave the farm, and go to work for the lumber mill in town.

I don't remember this but he was very strict and once chased my oldest brother around the barn with a belt, trying to beat him for being late. It was a turning point. He had lost it and he knew it.

With me, the last of six children, he was always very gentle.

He liked to watch pro wrestling -- cheering the good guys and booing the bad -- and refused to believe the fights were fake.

He liked beer but preferred Coca-Cola.

He and my mother added a wing to my childhood home without the benefit of blueprints.

When the rest us were in the basement watching TV, you could find my father upstairs in the living room most nights, reading.

Like his father, he died of cancer at an early age. Fifty-three.

I'm fifty-two.

All or Nothing?

2007-03-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I heard someone I like, someone I respect very much, say, "All religions are stupid."

I didn't say anything because, well ... all religions are stupid.

They're also deeply profound.

They speak to people in some essential way. They must. Otherwise, it seems to me, they wouldn't have any followers.

Here it's probably worth noting that I know a fair amount about one religion and a little about several others, but that's it. There are plenty I know nothing about. Plenty I don't want to know about.

Still, it seems fair to say that all religions are a mixture of life-altering truths and sometimes silly misconceptions. The only serious mistake, to my way of thinking, is the belief that there is only one path.

There are, in fact, many ways to reach any destination you can think of.

What makes religions seem stupid is that too many people think of them in all-or-nothing terms. I say take what works for you and discard the rest.

And be willing to change your mind in light of new information.

Marathon Entry

2007-03-10T10:37:00.000-08:00

The runners, more than a thousand of them, were gathering on Broadway for the start of the Trail’s End Marathon, the oldest race of its kind in Oregon. (Seaside, to be exact.) We walked along the street toward the beach and watched them jogging and stretching. It was already past eleven o’clock, and the race was less than half an hour away.

My friend Dan and I were supposed to be among the runners — this was in February of 1984 — but I had developed shin splints and, when they kept recurring, was forced to stop training. Dan hadn’t run since he hurt his back about a month before. Still, it was such a nice day — no rain and not much wind — that I was itching to put on my racing flats. We watched a dog do a trick with Frisbees and I said to Dan, “There’s still time to get changed.”

He shrugged it off as if I was only kidding, but I could tell he was fighting hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

“Come on ...”

“No.”

“You don’t have to finish. Just look at it as a workout with a bunch of other people.”

“No, if I start I have to finish.”

Then, as luck would have it, my wife said she needed to go to our room at the Ebb Tide to get a coat. We walked there with her.

“I’m going to do it,” I said, once in the room. “I’m changing.”

“You’re crazy,” Dan said, but he started changing, too.

Joanne (that’s my wife) could hardly believe it, but she helped me by pinning my number, 549, to my sweatshirt. We had only about fifteen minutes to get into our gear, relieve our nervous bladders, and get back to the starting area.

All three of us were laughing and shaking our heads as we left the hotel. “I don’t believe this,” Joanne said, more than once. She snapped a couple of pictures of us stretching on Broadway, then rushed off to tell the others in our party what we were doing.

We were standing near a hand-written sign that read, Over 4 Hours, but everyone pressed forward as the time drew near. Then I heard a pop that hardly sounded like a gun and we were off.

Slowly at first, we started to jog. The street was lined with people, but we didn’t see Dan’s wife, or her parents, or anyone in our group. Did they see us? No matter. We had a race to think about now.

There were hundreds of runners strung out in front of us, the leaders already out of sight before we had run two blocks. The temptation was to go with the flow — that’s how we had gotten into this thing in the first place — but I wasn’t completely out of my mind. I was able to fight the temptation, although Dad didn’t make it any easier.

“I want to go a little faster than this, don’t you?”

“No.”

Our first split was nine-something. Too fast, considering I hadn’t logged a single mile in the past month and had been able to run only fitfully in the weeks before that.

Dan seemed surprised our pace had been that fast. The news didn’t slow him down, though. I tried again to tell him to relax, enjoy the race.

“It’s hard for me to do something I did competitively for so many years,” he said, “just for fun.”

Our next split was eighteen-something, still a little faster than the pace I would have preferred, but I felt good. The sun was shining and I was enjoying this. As we approached the first station, I let it be known that I was going to walk through it rather than try to drink on the run. Dan agreed and told me to get the ERG, not the water. I had never had ERG before, but it wasn’t half bad.

By now I had no idea where we were, but there were plenty of runners to follow, and Dan knew the course, having run his first marathon here last year. He told me, as we ran, where it would be taking us, but it didn’t really mean much to me. I knew all I needed to know: the course was 26.2 miles. What I didn’t know was whether I could go the distance.

This was my first marathon, and I knew I was not ready for it. I thought: Maybe, though, if I forget about my time, I may just be able to get through this.

“What was cross-country like for you?” Dan asked.

“What was it like?”

“Yeah. What did you think about it? What was it to you?”

We had run together in high school, more than ten years earlier. Dan had been my best friend. A gutsy runner in the Steve Prefontaine mold. I was a middle-of-the-pack team member.

I told Dan I had enjoyed the camaraderie and had felt I was contributing to the success of the team. I also told him I regretted not having pushed myself harder. “But then I have a tendency to burn out if I train too hard — so maybe I knew what I was doing after all.”

We ran past the place where Dan had first met his support crew the year before and kept going for several miles before our impromptu crew honked and waved on its way by in the baby blue New Yorker.

A little while later we spotted Joanne on a corner, focusing her camera on us. Connie, Dan’s wife, was there, too. We asked for Vaseline.

Connie: “We don’t have any.”

Dan: “Go to the store and buy some.”

He was in pain. His shorts had been rubbing him the wrong way for miles.

I gave Joanne the sweatpants that had been bound around my waist almost from the start and she, running beside me, asked, “Are you going to finish?”

“We’ll see.”

She shook her head, smiling. “You guys ...”

But I was experiencing some chaffing, too, and I could tell I was going to have blisters on both feet.

The next time we saw our wives, sure enough, they had the petroleum jelly, and we stopped just long enough to smear some on.

On the run, I told Dan about my blisters and he said that when we saw the girls again I should put Vaseline on my feet.

“I hate to stop. They’re not too bad right now. But it might keep them from getting worse.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

The girls caught up with us again just before the half. We had been running for two hours by then — matching my longest training run. I still felt okay, but the miles were starting to take their toll. Already I had walked up one hill, trying to conserve energy, and had started to concern myself with running the shortest distance between points on the course.

The girls ran beside us along Highway 101 until we could find a suitable place to sit down. I ripped off one shoe: Dan ripped off the other. We got my socks off, and Joanne dolloped jelly on the ball of each foot. I caught a glimpse of one blister, and it looked worse than it felt, which so far wasn’t bad.

Back on the road, I tried to keep the pace down without being too obvious.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked.

“I feel fine. No problem breathing or anything. My legs are just getting a little heavy.”

“I’ll feel better when we hit mile sixteen. Then there’s only ten miles to go.”

“I should be able to handle that.”

The stretch along Surf Pines Road took a lot out of me, though. It was shaded and scenic, but the rolling hills sapped my energy.

We made it to mile sixteen all right.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked again.

“I’m not getting any faster,” I told him.

“You’re not?” He smiled.

Okay, I guess that was obvious. “I’m just going to try to hold on to this,” I said, meaning my pace, of course. “You can go ahead, though. I only asked you to stay back with me for the half.”

“No,” he said, “we’re going to do this together.”

I’m sure he meant what he said, but I had to walk up the hills and that was death to him. “It’s too hard for me to start running again once I do that,” he said.

I tried to keep running, but once we got on Del Rey Road, that little out-and-back leg, I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to walk.”

Dan kept going and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to hold him back. The last time I saw him he was on his way back down Del Rey. I gave him the thumbs up.

“I’ll wait for you,” he offered.

“No, go ahead.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, go on.”

So I was on my own. I jogged when I felt I could and walked when I had to. I remember Dan saying how demoralizing this leg had been for him the year before, and I could see why. It seemed to go on forever.

Getting down on the flat didn’t help. I jogged a few yards, but that was all. Walking was the best I could get out of my legs. (By contrast, Dan would rip off a few seven-minute miles starting here, I would learn later.) It was cold, with traffic stirring up a chilling breeze, and my legs felt like they might cramp on me at any moment. Hugging my wet shirt to my chest, I tried to keep warm and kept an eye out for the support car.

It was along here, as I walked from mile nineteen to mile twenty, that I began to think about my motivation. Why was I running this race anyway? What did I think I was doing out here on this desolate road?

I had thought about it before, when I was in training, but my answers did not seem as convincing now. I was out here to test my own determination, to see if I could reach a distant goal. But was it really that important, this goal? The marathon had always been a symbol for me, from the time I first decided to try it. It was a test. If I could go the distance, maybe I could achieve some of my other long-range goals as well. But I wasn’t prepared for this test. It didn’t count.

What I was after, I think, was that certain sense of self I had found through cross-country running in high school. It was in high school that I discovered I could do more than I thought I could. It was then that I had surprised myself with my endurance and gained a quiet sense of confidence in my abilities. That sense had been shaken of late by certain personal setbacks, and I was looking to get it back.

But now, being passed by frail old ladies and chunky girls, I couldn’t remember half of what I had told myself during training. I was ready to quit any time — and why not? I hadn’t been able to prepare for this race. I never expected to finish, not really. This was already farther than I had ever run. Dropping out now would be no disgrace. It certainly didn’t mean I would be giving up on my other goals.

I did some figuring and realized that even if I ran ten-minute miles, I’d still be out here more than an hour. And there was no way I could muster that kind of speed, not even close. Better to give up now.

I was convinced. I was done. Only one thing kept me going: the New Yorker was nowhere in sight. I had no choice but to keep moving.

There was an aid station at about mile twenty and, after drinking more ERG, I started to jog again. The course turned to the right and away from the heavily trafficked street I had been on. Just getting away from the cars made me feel better, and I jogged for maybe two miles, nonstop. I even ran backwards at times, just for the change.

I knew once I came around the golf course and saw 22 painted on the road, I would finish. I stopped thinking about how long it would take. Four miles was all I had left. I could crawl that far if I had to.

Dan was probably finishing about now, though I didn’t think about that. He would be struggling when he crossed the line, but not as much as the year before when he went out too fast and was practically delirious by the time he collapsed in the chute.

Shortly after the final aid station, someone on the side of the road said I had 3.1 miles to go. “Seven-eighths of the race is behind you,” she said. I liked the way she phrased that.

For several miles now I had been having an odd craving for a Hershey bar, and when I saw Joanne along the side of the road I made her promise to get me one when this was over.

She had gotten worried and walked the course backward until she found me. I was moving slowly, but had not collapsed in a heap somewhere along the side of the road as she had feared. She was prepared to jog with me, and I tried it briefly, but mostly I just walked. I thought I would save whatever I had for the promenade. I didn’t want to be walking then, with everyone watching.

As we reached the promenade, there was Dan. His arm around Connie, he leaned on her and limped when he walked. He had a smile for me, and a word of encouragement.

Then we started running, Joanne and I. There weren’t many people around, but that didn’t matter at all. In fact, it was better that way, for me.

I glanced at my watch for the first time in about an hour. “Let’s pick it up a little,” I said. “I want to see if I can break five hours.”

We did pick it up, and I had more left than I thought I would, but the finish was farther away than it looked at first. I could see before I got there that too much time had elapsed.

Joanne peeled off, and I stopped looking at the official clock. I concentrated instead on the finish line. I even forgot to stop my watch when I crossed it. But I remembered something: a feeling I had all but forgotten.

What's in a Name?

2007-03-03T19:26:00.000-08:00

I changed my name when I was fifteen. I wasn’t in any kind of trouble, I just didn’t like the person I had become.

That's not quite right. I simply didn't like the image I had of myself. I saw myself as timid and too easily given to tears. I was wishy-washy and didn't know my own mind. (Few fifteen-year-old really do, but I didn't know that.)

In one sense, my name didn’t really matter. I was living in a new state, and the friends I made knew nothing of my imperfect past. I was free to reinvent myself.

The new name was for my benefit.

Anyway, it was easy to make the change. Up until then, everyone had called me Fred. From then on, I would be Al. Since the name on my birth certificate is Alfred, no paperwork was required.

Did it make a difference? I don't really know. I chose Al because it sounded more sophisticated to me at age 15. But I don't feel any more sophisticated at 52, and it doesn't really matter to me anymore.

Well, not much.

I'm certainly not the small-town boy I once was, and I can't imagine living in a small town again. On the other hand, I still have a sister who calls me Fred and I like how it sounds. Friendly and unpretentious. Qualities I'd like to accentuate.

Alive

2007-02-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

I was behind the wheel of our two-door Honda Civic, barreling up I-5 toward Portland, when a smile stretched my lips. I was thinking: Dan is alive! He’s alive and when we get there I can talk to him and we can laugh together the way I feel like laughing now.

This was in 1982. Connie, his wife at the time, had just called us.

“Dan was electrocuted today,” she said.

There was no other word for it. He had taken a lethal 400 volts. No one could explain why he wasn’t dead.

When Joanne and I arrived in Portland, I went to shake my friend's hand.

“Not that one” he said and gave me his left. “The other one’s still a little sore.”

He was lying on their couch, that big brown thing they got such a deal on, and he looked tired, like his limbs were too heavy to lift. He spoke in his normal voice, though, and tried to joke as if nothing serious had happened.

Finally we got the whole story:

They were setting up a conveyor outside on the tank farm at Steinfeld’s, trying out a new idea for streamlined processing of . . . cauliflower, I think. Anyway, some guy forced the plug into a high-voltage outlet where it didn’t belong, and when Dan went to reposition the conveyor, 400 volts grabbed him. He screamed once and tried to get free, but it was useless. The electricity lifted him off the ground and put him back down.

That’s all he remembers.

Witnesses -- and there were lots of them, bosses and workers -- said Dan was bounced twice and then hurled, head high, for a distance of about fifteen feet. His body went into rapid convulsions.

At the hospital, doctors looked for entry and exit burns but found none. They gave him a tetanus shot for all the scrapes he suffered hitting the pavement, examined him, and sent him home with a complete recovery expected.

Dan’s sister, Kathy, a nurse there at Emanuel, couldn’t believe they didn’t want to keep him overnight for observation, but here he was at home already. He let Joanne compare one arm to the other, and she said the right arm was still warmer to the touch. Some of the voltage was still coursing around in there.

“I guess the Lord wanted to keep me around a little longer,” Dan said.

His mother, Joy, a compact woman with dark curly hair, was in the kitchen cleaning up after their Kentucky Fried dinner. She had already lost her first husband, Bill, in an on-the-job accident. Kathy was there, too. She had been in nursing school when Joy drove to Portland to deliver the news, and so the job of telling Dan -- it had to be in person, not by phone -- fell to me, his best friend.

He was telling me now that he would have to go back to the plant the next day, see the scene, and actually touch the conveyor.

“That’ll be hard,” he said.

“Have to get back on the horse that threw you, huh?”

He didn’t answer me, just nodded blankly, and I wondered if he was thinking about the trip we made to the plywood mill to see the machine that struck down his father. He had insisted on seeing it; I’m not sure why. To make it real, I suppose. He was having trouble accepting it could happen -- and did happen.

I was thinking about a lot of things. About a silent ride to Eugene in the truck of a family friend some eight years earlier, the highway straight and flat and dark ahead of us. About waking Dan with a late-night phone call once we got into town so he could give us directions to the trailer house he was sharing with some other students. About how he could see it in my face when he opened the door -- how I wanted him to see it -- before I said a word. Because all I could come up with was: “Your dad is dead.”

Later he would tell me he was glad it was me who broke the news; he couldn’t have taken it from anyone else, he said.

I had lost my own father to cancer so I knew what it was like and I guess that made all the difference, but I remember thinking, What if Dan had died today as, by all rights, he should have? Who was going to tell me, without warning, that he was gone? Who was I going to be able to take that from?

Here he was, though -- blinking, breathing, speaking.

Questions of life and death and why were swept aside because here in front of me was something I could accept without question: My friend was alive.

Seven Sayings, One Source

2007-02-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

Of all the things I've been taught in 52 years, these seven (all from the same source) have shaped my thinking the most.

> "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

> "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's."

> "Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves."

> "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."

> "Love your enemies."

> "Whatever you want others to do for you, do so for them."

> "Seek and you will find."

Playing with Guns

2007-02-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

I remember a first-grade classmate saying, "You mean your dad and my dad could have been shooting at each other?"

It was possible.

I hadn't really thought about it before then, and it felt funny to admit it, but it was possible.

It was no secret that my dad and mom were born in the old country. For one thing you could hear it. Even when they spoke English, which was most of the time, my parents didn't sound quite like other people.

If you looked close you could see that my dad had been in the war. It was evident in the half-thumb of a war-torn hand. (The left, I think, though I'm no longer certain.) You could see it even more when he was working in the sun and took off his shirt. There on his back was a long, deep crater about the size of a razor clam. The first time I saw it I asked him what it was and he said, very simply, that a bomb exploded near him during the war and a piece of it landed in his back.

I could see that it had been bad, but as a young boy I never even thought about how much worse it could have been.

The day my classmate told me, toy gun a-blazing, about his dad fighting the Germans, I asked my dad about fighting in Hitler's army. I don't recall exactly what I asked, or all that he said, but I do remember the look on his face and the way he shook his head.

He made it clear that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, but then he surprised me with this:

"Hitler did a lot for the German people," he said.

"He did?"

"Ja, sure, in the beginning we were much better off than before ..."

Then, I think, it was impossible for him to tell a young boy everything that was going through his mind.

Forty-some years later, I would sooner forget that my father said what he did about Hitler doing a lot for the German people. But there it is. I remember interrupting -- "He did?" -- because it shocked me, even then, that the name Hitler could be connected with anything but evil. I was too young to realize (as I'm sure my father did) that the connection was there in what he had just told me -- the division, deprivation, and depravity already implied.

Nine-One-One

2007-02-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

It was a Sunday night in December of 1996, our first year in the house, and we were about to find out how long it would take paramedics to reach our doorstep.

Joanne had gotten out of bed at some point. I knew she wasn't feeling well, and I heard her moan as if ready to throw up. Then there was the clatter of our plastic waste basket tipping over. Then a heavy thump.

I called to her.

No answer.

I found her stretched out on the bathroom floor, her head twisted in a tiny corner where the wall extends just beyond the edge of the tub. Her eyes were open and she was white.

She still wouldn't answer.

I cradled her neck and eased her down flat. Then came the horrifying second when I looked down into her vacant eyes and thought: she's dead.

I didn't want to believe that. I said her name again and again. I couldn't find a pulse. She was so white. I tried to remember CPR and mouth-to-mouth. Make sure her breathing passages are clear, I thought. When I pinched her mouth, I heard her suck air. Good. But her eyes. They didn't move. Didn't even blink.

Back in the bedroom, I dialed 9-1-1, then dragged the phone as far into the hallway as the cord would allow. The part you hold to your ear stretched almost to the bathroom. As I was babbling incoherently, Joanne said, "What are you doing? I'm fine."

I told the operator, but she said the paramedics would be here soon.

A fire truck arrived a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance. Though Joanne seemed to check out okay, they took her to the hospital just to be safe. (Here's the thing: In the morning she was going to quit a job she once loved but now hated, and she had been stressing about it so much she passed out. Breaking an 11-year bond is not something Joanne takes lightly.)

The next day she was resting on the sofa and asked me to fix her some toast.

Grudgingly, I got up and walked to the kitchen.

"You know," I said, "I’m only doing this because you’re alive."

Wants and Needs

2007-01-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

In my day job, I work for a high-tech company, writing about breakthroughs that I try to describe in terms that even I can understand. Hey, I studied journalism in school, not science, so I try to keep it simple. I have to.

The truth is, I admire engineers, scientists, technologist. They impress me not only with their brains but with their hearts.

What motivates them more than anything is a desire to change the world. They spend their time finding ways to do things like, oh, help cancer researchers run simulations 50 times faster. What's more, they refuse to accept the notion that something can't be done simply because other smart people tried and failed.

In short, they're inspiring. There doesn't seem to be any limit to what they can do if they set their minds to it. Yet the best technologists I know think very seriously about the implications of what they're doing.

Most of us don't even do that much.

Which is why I was glad to see Fast Company's "E-Tool Bill of Rights," designed to reset expectations and redraw boundaries that technology tends to erase.

We should never forget that technology is made for us and not the other way around. But it goes beyond that.

Too often, I think, we let the things we want pull us away from the things we need. What we want may be a raise, a promotion, a new car, or a cure for cancer. Good things. But in their pursuit, we've become too busy to eat right, too wound up to sleep at night, too tired to exercise.

In short, we need to take better care of ourselves.

Life is precious.

Random Images

2007-01-21T17:40:00.000-08:00

Barefoot girl in a backless dress.

Traffic lights reflected on wet pavement.

The shadow of a small plane flickering across the contours of a grassy shoreline.

Long-haired boys and short-haired girls.

A blue Adirondack chair by itself on the lawn.

Wind-blown palms through mosquito netting.

A white blouse with black buttons.

The smell of chlorine and Coppertone.

A big-breasted blonde in a black bikini.

Silver jet streaking over black hills in a twilight sky.

Cliche curtains ruffled by a lacy breeze.

"Eyelashes wasted on a boy."

Ice-blue lights on the bare branches of twin trees.

Red tail lights fading into a black-and-white winter night.

Now, Smile!

2007-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

I lost a tooth yesterday. Not just any tooth. One of the front two. The right one, to be exact.

I broke it Friday night biting into a piece of pizza of all things. The pie was a little crispy from being reheated in the oven, but still. I was shocked.

At first the tooth was just loose, but Sunday it broke off while I was chewing something soft and doing my best to avoid the danger zone in my mouth.

Standing in front of a mirror, squinting at the jagged little stump that used to be my tooth, I was in for another shock: I looked like a derelict. It was quite horrifying actually.

This morning my dentist told me that teeth get brittle as we get older. Plus, I have what he called a deep bite, so he wasn't surprised at all. He simply fitted me with a temporary tooth -- nothing that would withstand a bite of french bread, but at least I look like my old self -- and scheduled a root-canal operation for later in the week.

I'm told that there's a lesson to be learned from every experience, and in this case the lesson is simple: I need to appreciate what I have before it's gone.

Knowing that -- really knowing it -- is worth more than any tooth.

Work in Progress

2007-01-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

I struggle sometimes, because I don't trust my own perceptions.

Should I?

To me the world looks flat, but pictures from space show that it's quite round.

On the other hand, don't try to tell me what to think. I trust my own mind more than anyone else's.

Except when I don't.

The strange thing is it's easier to disbelieve than it is to believe. Disbelief is safer somehow. To believe is to put yourself on the line.

I like to think of myself as a spiritual person. My intuitions, when I trust them, are almost always good. I should trust them more. I think.

I think of the time I was first in line at a red light and thought, Don't be in a hurry. It was an odd thought because I had no reason to be in a hurry. Then, sure enough, a car came speeding through the intersection from my left, two seconds after my light turned green and his turned red.

But I also think of the time I told my best friend he should look for a new job in Roseburg, Oregon. I don't know why I thought of Roseburg -- I'd only been there once -- but he did indeed find a job there. Only it didn't work out and he quit soon after he started.

Good thing he doesn't really remember me suggesting Roseburg.

I've been trying to increase my awareness through yoga, and I look forward to Mondays in particular. On Monday nights, the center where I train holds a special class in which we do 103 Chun Bu Kyung bows. Think of it as an exercise in sincerity and humility. An active meditation. Whether you believe in the Chun Bu Kyung -- an ancient spiritual code that begins and ends with one -- doesn't really matter. Everyone ends the night feeling calm and peaceful.

Or energized.

You have to trust your own experience.

Sometimes our instructor will ask us to consider a question while we bow. "Ask yourself, 'Who am I?'" she told us recently.

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

I was getting nothing. And then ...

You are God's creation.

I don't know where that came from, but it made me smile.

Later I would wonder if it was a message from the cosmos or just a random thought, but in that moment, I was happy to be God's creation. I felt his pleasure in what he had created.

And in the next moment I realized I was also my own creation.

Think of it (me) as a collaboration.

As a storyteller, I know a little about creating characters and having them take on a life of their own. I love that.

I think God loves it, too.

What I've Learned

2007-01-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

> If you're going to criticize me, say something nice first, even if you don't mean it. It will help, even if I know you don't mean it. (Note: Others may require actual sincerity.)

> When I'm feeling down, I play Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun" over and over and over. With each repetition, I start to feel stronger.

> If you like to dance, dance -- and don't let anything stop you. Not shyness. Not anything.

> The punishment for lying is always wondering if others are lying to you.

> Buy Reese's peanut butter eggs at Easter time. They're way better than the peanut butter cups. They're fresh.

> Hatred is a waste of time. You only make yourself miserable.

> If you're taking a cruise on, say, the Danube, choose the downstream tour. Less engine noise.

> Think about it: If you were God -- omniscient and all-powerful -- could you ever be jealous of anyone or anything?

> Would you demand that people worship you?

> If you did, what would that say about your emotional maturity?

> Note to President Bush: If positive thinking were enough, our troops would all be home by now. Try something new.

> Keep a cool head, an open heart, and a warm belly.

> The movie What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole will boggle your brain.

> Even when I was attending church and studying the Bible like crazy, I could never understand prayer. You can't say anything to God he doesn't already know.

> Now I think the trick is to make your whole life a prayer, even if you feel compelled to use profanity now and then.

> I really like this quote from Depak Chopra: "At any given moment the universe is working toward the best possible outcome."

Hat humbly doffed to Esquire for its inspiring January issue.

Fear of Success

2006-12-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've reached the point in my life where I'm more afraid of failure than I am of success.

It feels strange to say that -- the last part, especially -- but the truth is I've always been one to hold back. Why? The more you do, and the better you do it, the more people expect from you.

And I'm not comfortable with expectations.

I suppose if I had enough confidence not to care what people think ... well, I'm getting there.

But the fear of success is more than that. I won a state-wide award once when I was in high school, and my best friend wondered if I would still hang out with him. Really. That's what he told me. Not at the time, but later.

So the thing to fear, I think, is that success changes people in unpredictable ways.

If I were successful -- wildest dreams successful -- would I turn into a pompous ass? Would I be too good for my friends. Would they think so even if I didn't?

Would new friends be real friends? Would they tell me the truth or just what I wanted to hear?

Would I lose the spark that drove me to be successful in the first place?

All of which sounds just a little ridiculous when my wildest dreams remain out of reach.

Storytellers

2006-12-16T09:25:00.000-08:00

I'm always thinking about stories and how they are told.

A great way to learn, I've discovered, is to read the same story twice. Or read the same story as told by different writers.

The four gospels, for example.

It's interesting to see what each writer chooses to leave in and leave out. How the the order of events gets changed around. How the writers differ in their descriptions of, say, crowd reactions. How they differ in their characterizations of the twelve apostles.

(Hint: Read one complete gospel each day. Otherwise they all blur together.)

Movie versions can be revealing, too.

Take The Passion of the Christ.

I wasn't surprised that it was controversial, but I always thought it was controversial for the wrong reasons. (Old news, I know, but now Gibson has directed another movie, Apocalyto, also not in English, and it got me thinking about his choices.)

To me, The Passion stands as a shining example of how a story changes in the retelling. Even in the hands of someone who believes the story is true. Even in the hands of some one who cares enough about historical accuracy use the languages of that time and place.

Like the Gospel writers, Gibson made certain choices about what to include and what to leave out and, perhaps most revealing, what to add.

Matthew chose to begin with Jesus' birth, Mark with his baptism, Mel with his arrest. I guess he assumed we were all familiar with the rest of the story, though he did throw in flashbacks to a few key events -- the Sermon on the Mount, the Woman Caught in Adultery, the Triumphal Entry, the Last Supper.

In the case of the woman caught in adultery ("Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"), he chose to place Mary Magdalene in the role, which would explain why she appears so devoted to Jesus in the rest of the film. Historically accurate? No. But, in Hollywood parlance, the flashback "works." It makes emotional sense and makes for a better, more compact story.

To borrow a phrase from novelist Ken Kesey, "It's true even if it never happened."

The same could be said of this addition: As Jesus falls under the weight of the cross he must carry, we see his mother watching and recalling Jesus falling down as a toddler. Clearly, she wishes she could scoop him up again and comfort him as she did then. It's a touching moment and could even be true. After all, what mother hasn't comforted a child who has fallen? Was that really what Mary was thinking? Doesn't matter. It works, right?

Well, not for me, but never mind.

The most surprising addition, though, was a flashback to Jesus as a young carpenter who builds a table that is unusually high for the time period -- he has to explain to his mother how people will sit at the table using chairs he hasn't built yet.

Go figure.

Maybe Jesus was a visionary carpenter as well as a visionary teacher. Maybe his accomplishments as a furniture maker were simply overshadowed by his other insights. The high table forgotten; his admonition to love our enemies remembered.

We all remember that, right?

If not, all the storytellers have failed.