Post 1- the long sentence

About a year ago, I was in a screenwriting class where I was paired to do a short film with a friend, Gina, who had invited another friend to come and help with our movie, even though the script called for one actor, so we added a snippet where she played a FBI agent that was coming up my driveway (I’m not sure how that clip fit in with a film about coming up with an idea for a script [an overplayed plot, but it was our first movie]), and to get her into character, we gave her a backstory and lots of details that weren’t in the movie and were irrelevant to the plot, as far as I remember, but that seemed to help her, and after a few takes of her slouching up the driveway like she was delivering bad news, we knew she wouldn’t come across as an agent, but the project was not being graded on casting or acting abilities, so we needed something, a small action, that is overused by actors playing agents on television which would make her identifiable, even if it was as a stock character, so Gina told her to pretend to talk into a hidden microphone in her shirt sleeve, even going as far as to show her by performing the action herself, but the friend (whose name I can’t even pretend to remember) must have misunderstood, so the final take that we were forced to choose had the friend walking up the driveway mumbling into her bare wrist, looking like a lunatic.

Julie Kuralt

Four Years

I wasn’t expecting the phone call around 7 p.m. from Sara requesting for me to go to the mall with her. I hadn’t heard much from her since we’d graduated a few months prior, even though we used to be best friends. I told her my family and I were about to eat, but when I told her we were finished, she said she would come and pick me up. I wasn’t expecting her to still be interested, because that was her way, but I shrugged it off, thinking, “at least it will be an exciting night.”

We drove off to pick up our friend Katie, and then we were off to the strip mall. Our first stop was Barnes and Noble, where we perused the various books and bought pastries. Sara suggested we go and see the new Transformers movie that had just come out, but I was not particularly interested in seeing it. Being the introvert I was, rather than telling them I didn’t want to see it, I slid out of the conversation and went to look at the stuffed animals in the back.

They eventually found me and announced that we were going to walk down to the movie theater to see the Transformers movie. Defeated in the battle I’d chosen to not take part in, I obliged and walked down the long way with them. By this time it was around ten o’clock, so when we reached the theater, it was pretty much deserted. There was only one person in the main lobby of the theater: the ticket guy. He looked about our age; he was tall with curly dark brown hair, wearing the required black vest, bow tie, and pants of a movie ticket clerk.

We walked up to him to inquire about movie times. He was more than willing to tell us what movies were about to start and describe what they were about for us. I wasn’t too thrilled to be there, as I didn’t want to spend ten dollars on a movie I didn’t even want to see, but I tried to be polite and smile at him. He informed us that the Transformers movie was going to let out at around one in the morning, which deterred Sara from wanting to watch it in a way that I would never be willing to.

So, we decided, or rather, Sara decided, that we would watch The Hangover instead, because it would get out more around 11:30 or midnight. I handed my ten dollars to the ticket guy, still unhappy with having to pay for a movie, but at least now it was a movie I had kind of been interested in seeing.

We found our seats in the back row of the theater. I sat between Sara and Katie and we waited for the movie to begin. A few minutes into the film, the ticket guy from earlier walked into the theater. I watched as he came closer to the back where we were sitting, and I knew that he was there for one of us.

He walked up to us and asked if we would mind if he sat with us. Sara answered that it would be fine, but I was thinking it was pretty weird. A guy wouldn’t ask to hang out just because he thought we were cool. I also thought it was a little creepy that he was the one who gave us our tickets, so he knew what theater we would be in and he found us after he got off his shift. I was glad I wasn’t sitting on the end.

A few minutes passed and he just watched the movie with us, laughing at some of the same parts I did, I noticed. Finally, he turned to us and introduced himself.

“I’m Jeff, by the way.”

He shook Sara’s hand, then looked to me and shook my hand. I expected him to then move on to shake Katie’s hand, but he didn’t. Instead, he stopped at me and said,

“I'm sorry, I never do this and it's going to seem really nerdy, and it took a lot of guts to come up here and say this, but I think you're really pretty and I was wondering if I could have your number…”

I was completely caught off guard, because in all honestly, I was half paying attention to him and half paying attention to the movie (at this moment, the men had discovered there was a tiger in the bathroom, which was a part of the previews, so I wanted to see what would happen).

I turned to him, stupidly, and said, “Wait, what?”

Sara took the reins for me again and told him that I was taken. It was more or less true; I was in a relationship, if that’s what you’d call it. It wasn’t going well, and in a few weeks’ time, the relationship would be over.

Jeff said, “Oh okay, sorry,” and got up to leave. Sara commended his efforts—having the guts to come up to ask me out—to which he said thanks, and left. Because we were in the back, I had to watch him walk all the way down the aisle from the top of the theater and then all the way across the front to the exit, doing something of a Charlie Brown walk. I felt bad for him. He did seem like a nice guy, but I didn’t like that he would come after me based solely on my looks, not who I was. That’s just how I felt about guys.

But as I watched him walking away, a thought flashed through my mind. Even though I was in a relationship, failing as it was, I still thought, “Wait! What if he is my soul mate?” I couldn’t explain it, even now.

After the movie, the theater was completely empty. Not a soul to be found. It was pitch black outside, save for the streetlights, and we had a long walk back to the car, which was still parked at Barnes and Noble. We began the trek back to it, but Sara and Katie began to become uneasy about how late it was, and suspected that the people ahead of us were doing some sort of drug deal, because “there is no reason for anyone to be here this late at night.” I thought they were being silly, but they were convinced we would get shot if we progressed any further. Their ideas started getting to me, and I wished Jeff was still there to protect us, as silly as that sounds.

Sara called her stepfather to come pick us up from one side of the mall and drop us off at the other, as ridiculous as that sounds (but better safe than sorry, right?), and then she took us home.

It would come to pass that about a month later, I was looking through Facebook and came upon a photo my friend Laszlo was tagged in. I hadn’t heard from him much since high school, so I clicked on it to see how he was doing, what he was up to. But when I clicked on the next picture, I came across a surprise. There was a guy in the background, and he looked oddly familiar. Then it struck me who he was. It was Jeff, the ticket guy. It looked like he and Laszlo had attended a party together.

I sent Laszlo a text, asking him who that guy was and if he worked at the movies. He promptly responded. Not only did he confirm that it was him, he also told me that Jeff is his cousin. I was dumbfounded; what a small world (or at least a small town).

I jokingly told him to tell him I said hi, if he remembered me, and Laszlo told me that I should send him a friend request, because he was standing right behind him. I was a little embarrassed, but I figured if I didn’t, it might seem rude, so I did.

I was glad to find that there were no hard feelings. He light heartedly asked me how I’d been since he’d creepily hit on me. We actually got to talking quite a bit, and I even tried to visit him at work one day. I wanted to go up and talk to him, but I didn’t have nerves of steel like he did, and couldn’t even muster up the courage to wave, let alone follow him to ask him out.

I would later tell him this, and he thought it was cute. He thought I was cute. He helped me feel like I had something to offer to the world. And, well, we have been dating for four years now.

Long Sentence

In terms of video game jargon, of which we were of course well versed, being teenage boys, we staggered into the 8 a.m. classroom meeting with 1HP, bearing two of the largest and strongest coffees known to man, having stayed up until past 3:30 a.m. the previous night cramming for the huge, cumulative history test, written by the most notoriously known demented and twisted professor at the establishment, only to learn that it had been postponed until the following Thursday, rendering us irritable, confused, and slightly hysterical for the remainder of the day, which consisted of the two of us laughing at the most mundane of things, struggling to walk straight, and constant trips to the bathroom due to the large intake of caffeine in our systems, which, incidentally, with the combination of coffees and energy drinks, caused us to become violently ill over the course of the next few days, leading to an inevitable absence on the day of the actual exam and, consequently, a failing grade of zero.

Long Sentence

If the guitar scholar had taken my bait at the bowling alley, had engaged me in a robust debate about rock guitarists, I would’ve said that Jerry Garcia is the greatest guitarist of all time because he was the lead guitarist for the house band at the parties where the mainstream split open and revealed a new option, the psychedelic path, there for all who wish to venture down it, for then and for all time, and that alone is enough, I think, to make him the greatest, but also because a nomadic subculture has grown around him and expanded to coalesce around other bands that have followed in his path, and these tribes still roam today, all these years after his death, and will continue to roam long beyond the lives of his great great great grandchildren, and, no matter what you might think of these psychedelic nomads, or the music that draws them, you have to admit that the same cannot be said of any other guitarist, plus he’s left behind an archive of sounds vastly more vast than that of any musician who has ever lived, thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of concerts, rehearsals, and studio outtakes, more than 30 years worth, and, by his own account, a good 80 percent of it was improvised, so we have in his legacy unparalleled access to the ever evolving creative mind and technical dexterity of a top-level artist, and as a scholar I know you have to at least appreciate that, and I say top-level artist because to say best is absurd, it’s too subjective, but still my money’s on Garcia, not so much because of the way he played, but because of the people he played with, and how they made him play, because it all goes back to the Dead starting out as the house band at the fabled Acid Tests, to being juiced up on pharmaceutical grade LSD, having the freedom to play or not play as the spirit moved them, the band developed a psychic bond that allowed them to all solo simultaneously and still somehow manage to keep in tact the basic structure of whatever tune they were playing, and so Garcia, as the leader, developed a skill for weaving the chaos together with his many strands of off-center scales while at the same time launching off on his own, from chaos into deep deep sonic space. 

Daisy

          It’s been several years now, and no one can figure out how to make one of these taxi apps for smart phones work properly. Each new developer promises efficiency and a smooth streamlining of the the grid, but here I am: alone in the parking lot of a gentleman’s club on an unusually cold August night in Atlanta, checking my email to see if this particular taxi service has confirmed my request for transport. I thumb up and down my screen, refreshing and refreshing, until I notice that my thumbing has synced itself with the thumping of the DJ’s bass that escapes the structure of the establishment. I buy the taxi service some time and check the score of the Braves game my friends and I left in the 7th inning. They’re in the 12th now. We missed a two run homer in the bottom of the 9th that forced extras. I’m sure they’d all rather be here, anyway.


Daisy’s dad is a lawyer at a big firm in Sandy Springs. Her mom is a paralegal at the same firm. She was at the Braves game too, but left early to come to work. I saw her for the first time about an hour ago, and the only reason I remember her name is because she took full advantage of her chosen motif. She wore a daisy themed outfit and brought a handful of flowers onto the stage, which figured in to the later part of her act.


         Now she’s sitting on the curb of the parking lot with me, bundled up in an oversized jacket, showing me this taxi app that she swears has worked for her before. She gives me her phone and I’m instructed to type in my current address along with the address of my desired destination. While I punch in the numbers, Daisy gets a text, which appears at the top of the screen. It’s from someone named “Dad” and it says “LaRoche solo HR. Bottom 15.” I read it to her and she tells me to write back “Damn. Don’t give up just yet.”
          I finish inputting all of my information and hand her phone back to her. Right then, the door to the club opens behind us. Daisy looks back to meet eyes with a man in a cheap suit. He nods to her and she pushes herself up from the curb. She tells me she’s got to get back to work and wishes me luck with the taxi. Just before she’s back through the door, Daisy’s phone rings and she answers it. She says something, then hangs up and looks at me. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.” She goes back inside.

Friday Night in the Royal Soho Hotel

It’s Friday night and I’m sitting at the Soho bar watching a band called Strange Planet. They’re a three piece playing pretty straightforward rock riffs under alt-pop vocal melodies with long hair and black T-shirts and it is clear to me that they truly miss the nineties. Their singer/guitarist looks a lot like Jesus and after their set my brother and I talk to him for a long time about Weezer, specifically Pinkerton, and share with him our deep love of most things Rivers Cuomo, despite the fact that these days all he seems to care about is destroying his fanbase. At some point I wander away from the conversation and snake through the mostly empty bar to the bathroom. I am already too drunk to give a shit about the fact that we’re supposed to play in an hour and as I’m pissing I read the words “I want to fuck your mouth” off the wall to my right.

Back at the bar I’m introduced to our sound guy for the night. His name is Dylan and I haven’t seen him since my sophomore year of high school, where I hated him from afar and knew him only as the kid who got caught trying to masturbate through his track pants in the back of Mrs. Chen’s Geometry class. He looks exactly as I remember him, except now with a beer in his hand instead of his dick. I am disheartened to learn that he is the son of the bar’s owners, who are fine people, and even more disheartened to learn that he is completely inept and “just filling in” for the normal technician. I smoke a cigarette, chug a Red Bull, and we start setting up. Our first sound check is over at 12:35, but even as the shrinking crowd gets smaller Dylan tells us not to start until 1:00 a.m.  

On stage, everything sounds like shit. My monitor is feeding back like crazy and all I can hear is my own dirty guitar signal and Dylan telling us to turn up, turn down, whatever—he doesn’t know. Nothing is mic’d properly, none of the levels right, and I can tell from the looks of the faces on the floor that this set will be a struggle. I want to call him out for being an idiot but decide against it because his parents are nice and in the room, and because by now I just don’t give a fuck and want to be done with the show.

We play a couple of songs and Dylan stops us to check some levels. We play another and he stops us again, telling us each time to turn our amps down. By the fifth song of the set our guitars are so low and our monitors so flooded and washed out that what we hear on stage doesn’t even sound like music. After that Dylan basically gives up and starts talking to some homely looking girl and we’re annoyed to the point of not caring so we turn our amps all the way back up and tear through the rest of the set. When we’re done the bar is deserted. We break down, collect the $200 we made on the door, and load up our cars. I don’t consider the time completely wasted, but the post-show blues after a night like this are tough to shake. If this band is my religion, tonight Soho is my crisis of faith.

The Reality of Dark Navy Vinyl

"Do you want to see her?," asked Mom.

What an odd question, I thought, but whether it was out of morbid curiousity or mere obligation, I followed my mother down the twenty-foot hall, veered slightly to the right and entered the room.

The room had not changed since my last visit twelve hours prior. Twizzler wrappers, soda cans, and water bottles were scattered throughout, sitting on counters and end tables. Shoes slid under chairs and overnight bags pressed against the wall. Afghans and pillows were strewn here and there from where my mother and aunt had attempted to sleep the night before. Evidence of our five day stay in this grim place.

The center of the room was the last place I wanted to look. I knew that if I looked where I didn't want to look, then everything that had transpired over the last few hours had really happened, and I was afraid that realization may bring the room and the world crashing in around me. But Fate is cruel and my eyes eventually found their way to the center of the room.

There she lay, still as undisturbed water. Peaceful and yet strangely uneasy. Or maybe it was my uneasiness. Her eyes were closed and her arms were gently draped across her stomach. The inevitable had finally reached us. Childishly, I thought maybe, just maybe, she was just sleeping, like I had seen her do so many times before during football games and family gatherings as she would doze in and out. Childishly, I thought she would wake up, swearing she hadn't been asleep. But deep down I knew, this time, she wouldn't wake.

Standing a few feet back, afraid to get to close to reality, I watched my mother take her mother's lifeless hand, while tears welled in her eyes. I stood there motionless, except for my nervously twitching fingers. "She went peacefully," Mom sighs. I nod.

Finally, after what seemed like ages, we left the room, walked back down the hall and into the waiting room. The funeral home had come to start the arrangements made days before. They walked down the twenty-foot hall, veered slightly to the right, and entered the room.

Fifteen minutes later, the funeral director quietly rolled the stretcher down the hall. The last sight I saw that day of my grandmother was that of the dark navy vinyl of the body bag.

The Knowledge of Living

            You learn the most important things at the library, and I’m not talking about the “reading is knowledge” spiel educators use to inform the public on the benefits of tax-paid books. It’s the kind of things that only a public environment, filled with anyone and everyone, can share to the less informed, and more sheltered individuals such as myself. I’ve expanded my vocabulary by learning new words such as “bong” or “macking”. I’ve observed that black leggings with white underwear are considered suitable legwear. I’ve encountered multitasking by running away from a couples’ fight while simultaneously noting that people still use Myspace and use Myspace to write down nasty messages that start fights.

            Yet, if I think about it, I could have learned these facts from anywhere. You just have to step outside your front door to encounter the best and brightest possibilities the public world has to offer to you. School life has been famous for its second education, the kind taught by your more informed peers. I admit I’ve garnered some information from my public schools, mostly how long I can procrastinate before doing my assignments. I’m sure parks and malls are just as suitable education grounds. I just happened to latch onto the library.

            It happened just like an addiction. I wasn’t introduced to the library when I was a little kid. Instead, my mother bought me picture books which slowly progressed to chapter books. She had me hooked on Harry Potter, which she read to my sister and me every night. I didn’t get my first real visit to a library until the family moved from a big city in Missouri to a small town in Kansas. The school I went to in Kansas was horrible, but they had a great library, so I went there to start getting my real book rush, which was aided by new and frequent trips to the public library with my mom. We left that small town in Kansas in less than a year, but my need for books wasn’t settled as I moved to a middle school with an even better library. It was in middle school when my book addiction helped me with the special public-environment education.

            The first rule was never turn the computer on during after-school hours. Computers are the holy instruments of the library and not to be touched when off except by those who work there. I didn’t realize I had done anything wrong until I heard the librarian say, “Who turned that on?” and I shift around in my seat to see her standing behind my back, staring down at me. I made a sort of sideways glance to the other line of six computers, hoping I wasn’t the only one here. I was, so I looked up at her and said, “me”. She leaned over me to reach the computer and pressed the power button before the computer had even finished starting. “You don’t turn the computer on after I turn them off,” she said and I nodded, then scooted out of there and walked briskly down the fluorescent light and linoleum floor hallway without the book I was hoping to find.

            After my first lesson I had some reservations about going to the library again, but when you have an addiction your self-preservation instincts are put on the back-burner. It didn’t help that my mom had decided to start taking my sister and me to a public library nearby our house, where I encountered a teen book section for people around my age. However, I spent infrequent amounts of time in the library, so my education was not as prolific as it was later on, when my addiction would require stable doses of library visitation to satisfy my book needs.

            I’d never heard of volunteering at the library before until I was almost thirteen. I was with my parents and my sister in the children’s department at the library near our house. My dad was talking to the librarian there, looking for a book for my sister. He liked to talk though, so the conversation, while I was looking for a book, had veered toward my age and before I knew what was going on he called me over to the desk. My mother, my father, and the librarian stood around me in a semi-circle, smiling like they had good news for me. It felt like a ritual, the kind that requires a sacrifice, and it was. It was the ritual of getting your first job. My dad spoke first. “Mrs. Brown would like to tell you something,” he said. The librarian looked at me, “Hi Sunshine, how are you?” she started. “Fine,” I replied, clasping my hands over the books I was holding. “We have a program where people your age can help out at the library. I have a paper here and if you fill this out with your parents you can volunteer here every week. How does that sound?” I shrugged my shoulders which wasn’t the right answer. The librarian turned to the people who mattered, my parents, and handed them the paper. “Turn it in whenever you’re ready,” she said and walked back to her desk.

My parents looked at me, and I knew that the decision had already been made. “I’m not old enough to volunteer, and they wouldn’t want me to work because I’m a bad worker. They’ll fire me,” I said and my dad laughed. “You’re working for free. They’d never fire someone like you,” he said. I just shook my head, all of my unreasonable defenses had already been said. “How do you know unless you try,” he told me. I looked over to my mom. “Dad’s right,” she said.

            Wanting to avoid the topic, I stomped up the four steps that separated the children’s department from the rest of the library and checked out my books at the desk. My parents, after getting my sister, followed me. One year later I stepped into the main library branch for volunteer orientation. It was my second lesson.

            The lessons grew more numerous as I spent more time at the library. The man in the flowered hat wasn’t actually all that bad, you could never find a book someone was looking for in nonfiction, and yes, your name was still “Sunshine” no matter how many people asked when looking at your name tag, and the list continued. I went from volunteer to employee where longer hours brought more responsibilities.

            I often ask myself if I it was worth learning that the kid on computer nine was watching porn or that John, a regular visitor, had once drunk Kool-Aid with two packages worth of cough drops melted inside it. I think about these public-environment lessons, which are really just part of any life lessons, and I say to myself “sure, why not,” because it keeps life interesting. It keeps it moving forward.