Almost obliged by law to point out that in the book, the people of the Emerald City wear glasses to turn the tin world green, but in the movie, it's the camera that forces us to see it that way.\n\n<<back>>
"Do they really raise?" I ask my uncle.\n\n"Yeah -- but not that often. They form flotillas on the weekend."\n\n<<back>>
@@font: 12px "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", monospace;> Eat some airline peanuts for me--they are the best.@@\n\nOdd advice, surely not as significant as I think it should be. The peanuts are like \ngravel in my mouth.\n\n<<back>>
He was right. I did.\n\nMy uncle is driving me up Michigan Avenue, narrating the history of [[each landmark]] we pass. It's nighttime and [[everything's alight]]. Nothing seems fantastic -- unreal, I mean -- and yet things become grander and grander as we drive. The buildings [[aren't skyscrapers]], not the kind you see in New York City, but I can feel the sense of wonder growing inside me. A weird desire. Not sure how to [[spend the rest of the night|scribblings]]. \n\nWe reach the corner where my hotel is; I thank my uncle as much as I can manage, and then I [[take off on a walk]].
"He was my hero," I say about Hunter Thompson now. The moment he killed himself it changed, and it wasn't because I thought he was a coward for doing it. It was his choice and that's all I can ever decide about it. What changed my mind was reading too much of his work from the 70s, the stuff that didn't make sense now that the politicians were either disgraced or retired, and the elections had run their course. His two lessons remain:\n# When the world goes crazy, the best thing you can do is go crazy yourself.\n# The world's been crazy for longer than anyone can remember.\n\n<<back>>
"I don't believe in luck," I told [[her|she]], almost boasting. What I didn't say was that I didn't believe in Providence, either, or karma or kismet or any other sort of thing. I wanted her to ask what I did believe in, but she didn't. She just smiled obligingly, as if to say: //tell me something you haven't already thought out in your head.//
How many collective nouns can boys invent for groups of girls? How many ways to enchant themselves?\n\n<<back>>
Probably not a good choice for a first one, since it's almost all in the dark. But a historic one, maybe good for story-telling purposes.\n\n<<back>>
!!A Third Way\n!!!by Chris Klimas\n//On flying://\nI'm [[terrified of flying]] and I [[love it]]. [[I dream of it]] all the time. I can't explain it any other way to [[you]], what happened. [[What's happening]].\n\n//To Chicago://\n"I think you'll love Chicago," my father told me. This was code for: //[[I loved it]].// My father is not one to be [[unabashedly enthusiastic]] about anything. But you know it when he loves something: he gave me a guidebook, a thin one with a snappy graphic design. I read it on the subway to work one week. Just browsing through the neighborhoods. I don't know how to read a guidebook, [[don't know how to plan a trip]], don't even know [[how to find my way through an airport]]. But I went anyway.\n\n//But how?//\nUsed to think that //Why?// was the best way to start a story -- take the reader from start to finish, through the dream in between. A reason for every raindrop that strikes each character's head. A universe [[fully realized]]. But now my head is full of //how//s. How do I write this story? Not even a story, really. Can't be structured that way; doesn't have a conclusion, a lesson learned or a circle turned. How do I know when it's over? How will [[you]] know? Just [[scribblings]]. Not a story at all.
I used to play the [[Six Rejections Game|http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1153922]], or rather I'd recall my progress whenever things went wrong. Now I can't. I can't keep track anymore of how many //no//s there've been -- which must sound awful to [[you]], but [[this is progress]].
"[[Make no small plans]]. They have no magic to stir men's blood."\n\n-- [[Daniel Burnham|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham]]
Nearly nine hours. People always talk about jetpacks but how can you not believe you're living in the future when you can hold that much time in your hand?\n\n<<back>>
(I can't wait until my sister's wedding, just so I can see him and my mother dancing)\n\n<<back>>
That's how I'll know the story's done. When there's nothing left to recall. Victory through exhaustion. That's how you'll know the story's done. When there's nothing left to click. Close the window and go to sleep.\n\n<<back>>
"Do you call it The Magnificent Mile, or just Magnificent Mile?" I ask. I want to get the usage right.\n\n"Magnficent Mile -- er, the Magnificent Mile."\n\n<<back>>
I thought this as the El took me closer and closer to the city proper. The subway car was a pristine aluminum and the seats were packed tighter than they are in Baltimore. Instead of a pleasant female voice announcing stops, a harsh-but-fair male voice spoke to us. Not only naming the stations but also warning us to behave nicely to each other, to pick up our trash, to beware unattended packages. So unnerving, it was. Who wanted to hear this? And the door-closing chimes -- they were the same noise as the [[Lord of the Rings pinball machine]] totaling your score.
They tease me at work for asking the question so much. But I like this.\n\n<<back>>
My father set up the Apple II one evening on the dining room table, bit by bit. Each part a little stranger than the next. I knew video games but I didn't understand what a computer was meant to be. So I looked for [[games|Lord of the Rings pinball machine]].\n\nThe first game we had was called [[Flight Simulator|http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/history_fs.asp]]. It was just that: it gave you a Piper Cub to fly, a tiny two-seater, and the entire continental United States to fly in. But it wasn't realistic, not even close. The ground was flat neon green, the sky an unrelieved bright blue, and the ocean was magenta. There were places to see -- most notably the Statue of Liberty -- but there were great expanses of nothing between them.\n\nIn another age this would be grounds to dismiss it, but instead it made the game an endless mystery. I never learned [[to land]] in the simulator. Only to fly off into nowhere and hope there was something to see, at last.
Sometimes all it takes to make a story hang together is a single good sentence. A core that everything else orbits around. My uncle quoted this line to me and it felt like [[a message]]. And yet [[I don't believe in it]], not really.
They turn, the two of them, and look at me. //I'm about to get jumped.// Keep walking. Look at the ground.\n\n"Faggot," one of them says. "Educated faggot."\n\nI say nothing. In my mind it didn't happen. They let me pass. There is a policeman standing on the corner. I walk quickly but not anxiously. Look behind me when I open the door to the market but they're not there. It was just a thing that happened. They weren't going to jump me. Who knows. Not worth knowing.\n\n<<back>>
I grew up a little when I learned what clouds looked like from above.\n\n<<back>>
Stories turn more interesting when there's a //you// involved. You don't even need to define who it is or if there's some message you want this person to know -- it's just an amorphous audience, [[a someone out there]].
"Woah, can I stay at the Four Seasons?"\n\nThe name is unreal to me -- aren't only famous people supposed to go there?\n\n//Click.// Large numbers appear onscreen.\n\n"Hmm... maybe not."\n\n<<back>>
"Would you like a beverage, sir?"\n\n"I'm good, thanks." The polite way is always to answer a question indirectly, or not at all. The male part of the couple next to me drinks its Miller Lite, and the female part sips its wine from the spill-proof fat-bottomed cup. Instead of drinking, I time the progress of my flight by the three packets of salty snacks I've been given. There is nothing else to go by. I had to turn off my cell phone and there is nothing to see [[out the window]], not even the wing.\n\nFirst [[the peanuts]], then the crackers shaped like airplanes, then the pretzels donated to me by the beer-drinker. I eat slowly, and I finish just in time for us to descend through a solid [[wave]] of turbulence to [[Chicago]].
I'll tell [[you]] the truth -- I love landings completely. Not just because you get to see the city below, watch ant-sized cars drive beneath you, but also the sense of finality. The same feeling I get from the last hill of a roller coaster.
Never felt like my fiction was as real as when I wrote about real life, which is as it should be, right? But I felt I could do better if only I knew how. Keep working, the watchword of every writer. You only get better by being bad.\n\n<<back>>
If love can be [[compressed]], then why not through a cell phone? I call home to a friend and there's a roar of recognition in the background when he greets me. I am one hour removed from almost everyone I know but they're there, glad to hear from me. These things are so [[obvious]] but they count for so much.\n\nI walk down Michigan, staring at the shop windows and watching the people pass by. "I'm staring at a horse-drawn carriage," I tell my friend through the phone. //This was worth the price.// I draw the attention of one of the horses despite his blinders and think of reaching out to pet him but better just to walk forward, to keep seeing new things. There are so many people out but there's nothing for sale. I see a sign for a Lego store and a primal urge drives me towards it, but the revolving door inside is locked. I walk faster, pushing through crowds. Where is everyone going? There's nothing to see here, nothing to stand and stare at. All these things for sale that can't be bought at this hour. There must be bars or clubs or something nearby, though I can't pick out a pattern to the traffic.\n\nNor would I really want to [[go to a club]] -- I already know I'm getting too old for them now. Not blocked out completely -- just a little too old to take them seriously. Push further. Cross the street. Apologize to the man asking for spare change.\n\nThere, across the street. The [[Tribune Tower]]. Stare up at it. Reach a [[bridge]]. Stare into the water moving slowly. Think about how far to go tonight. Everything is up to you.\n\nIn daylight, on some other day, to some other person, this might be ordinary. For me it isn't. That's [[why]] I tell you this story.\n\n<html><b>∴</b></html>
"I've decided [[dating is retarded]]," I tell [[my sister]]. She sounds concerned, worried that her brother has gone completely [[round the bend]], will someday be found in a literal cave living as a literal hermit. A long beard. Rags. Whatever. I'm only being half-serious with her, the only way I can be when I'm truly worried about things.
A Third Way
Lying on the hotel bed at 10 o'clock Saturday night. This part I'll leave out of the retold version of the story. Walking out on the [[Magnificent Mile]] and feeling as though as my whole body would crack open, how full it was with new sights and thoughts. And maybe the evil-universe version of myself would have chosen a bar at random and kept going, missed his flight and never left [[Chicago]]. But the me-that-exists went home and flipped open his spiral notebook and started writing like [[a madman]]. Barely trying to print legibly. Jamming words into the margins. Falling asleep almost but struggling to write down [[every detail|windows]] he could think of. //Don't forget anything. It counts for so much. [[You haven't been anywhere new in so long]]. [[Link everything]].//
A writing teacher advised us to not worry about changing the facts in a nonfiction story, to rearrange things that didn't matter so that things became more [[compressed]].
The stairs diverge but neither way is listed on my map. Could be bad but pick the right-hand path, just to see where it leads. The streets are nearly empty. Two guys huddled in a bus stop, no doubt watching with interest at the dumb white boy. Quarter of ten on a Thursday night. There, tall buildings in the distance. //Your hotel's near the Tribune Tower. Go that way.//\n\nIt's cold, and worse, [[there isn't a single person]] on any of the streets I turn down. I turn down three streets, blindly following names of streets printed on my map, until I realize I'm lost in a city I've never been to before in the middle of the night. But I don't panic. That's the good part.
//The air is like a river,// I tell myself. //Some parts are rougher than others.// It makes sense, and turbulence isn't so bad, not in the plain light of day. The part that's hard is that you don't know what's coming and how bad it'll be, and you start to [[imagine]] how it could get worse --
The boys I hang out with obsess over games and I still don't know why. When I first met them, it was Axis and Allies. Pushing little plastic tanks across a starch-straight board, pretending you were either saving the world or dooming it. The decisions it asked you to make were absurd -- weighing whether to purchase a fighter plane or an industrial center. Then we played poker -- first Texas Hold 'Em, then Omaha High-Low -- and it taught me [[one useful thing|the poker metaphor]]. But they invited me out to drink one night and there I found out they had adopted yet another game, this time made out of steel and wood. And I learned a few of the tricks. The hardest part is learning the timing; the most essential is recognizing when the ball's on a path to drop right between the flippers, and how to nudge it back into play.\n\nI laughed at them inwardly when they first introduced me to the machine. What next-- the Atari 2600? And then I thought: [[why not?]]
I can feel the engines change timbre, and we pull away from the [[jetway|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetway]]. An odd sinking feeling, the same I felt before I rode my first roller coaster -- [[Space Mountain]]. //No turning back.// I think again of [[the poker metaphor]], which I came up with minutes before I got on board. It's absurd, the anxiety I feel. I tell myself that as well. //Let go of it.//
When we were little I'd show my sister how to win at video games; somewhere over the years we traded places and now she gives me serious advice from a remote outpost. She wants me to buy a house. She wants me to take grad courses. I instead spend my time losing my wallet and squabbling over rent.\n\n<<back>>
Reading this story -- how is anyone going to know what actually happened? (Does that matter?) Or even know what the story's supposed to be about? A little chaos goes a long way. A story told in half-bites may not really be a story at all.\n\nAnd the thing is, I can't really say what the story is about -- not yet. You only know the final words when you write them.\n\n<<back>>
Turn off all the lights in the hotel room. It's only 11:30 here. Tomorrow a big day. Should have gone to sleep earlier than this but it's too late. Feet ache and the brain clicks restlessly from thought to thought. Make sure the door is locked. Close the eyes. Sleep.\n\nImagine yourself somewhere else -- somewhere other the place you're in. Easier to sleep that way.\n\n<<back>>
The trick to winning at poker is to stop [[believing in luck]]. You have to rely on math instead, to make decisions knowing that when you are 4 to 1 to win, you will lose three of those times, and you're lucky to have those kinds of odds. When you start playing by math, you don't start winning more. You start losing less instead.
The day I reconciled with the girl I was in love with in college, I was walking to buy groceries, and there was a bumper sticker on a pickup truck: //The Magic Is Back//. That was all it said, is how I remember it. (Though perhaps [[my mind is warping reality to make things fit better]]...) And for a brief second the world felt magic again.
I'm standing waiting for the concert to begin. A [[gaggle]] of girls threads past me and one of them [[reaches out]] and grasps my hand for a moment -- feeling, not thinking or remembering --
The only way to end a story, no matter [[how|How?]] you try to convince yourself otherwise.
They're like malls, only incidentally allow you to transport yourself faraway. Food! Beer! Gifts and presents! Maybe this is to put you at ease, and maybe it's only inevitable that every man-made edifice somehow sells you something.\n\n//You're in Chicago,// I told myself. //Look for a bathroom, and then get something to drink. You're dehydrated. [[That happens on planes]].//
The road passes through a building, a structures framed around the roadway -- "This was a post office," my uncle explains, which seems incredible.\n\n<<back>>
[[A reference|http://imdb.com/title/tt0181875/quotes/#qt0093120]] to one of my favorite movies, //Almost Famous//. I love it because it's a love story about a nervous, naive writer and an impossibly graceful girl. The boy doesn't get the girl and yet the end of the movie is a victory. I saw //Annie Hall// this year and it's the same story, only older and less innocent; sadder and yet much more true-to-life. (I don't think these two words are bound together, and I especially don't want [[you]] to think I do.)
(Who I should have thought as myself, but I didn't)\n\n<<back>>
The night before I left for Chicago, I burned myself a CD of mp3 files -- my iPod died of a broken hard drive three weeks ago. Plug headphones into the work-issued laptop and turn off the world. That's the plan. Normally I just grab [[800 megabytes]] worth of the most recent music I've downloaded or ripped and go, but this time I sat in the dark and filtered through, picking songs that felt right. However anyone can decide what feels right.\n\nThe computer chirped at me and I ejected the CD, stared at it for a minute, and wrote on it:\n\n[[Everything Is Happening]]
"That might not be a bad thing. It depends on the neighborhood." Her voice is warm, even over the cell phone.\n\n"I don't care -- anyway, I got a cab and I made it, and my room's on the 27th floor." Hard to explain why this fact, of everything that happened to me that day, amazes me. \n\n<<back>>
I used to think sometimes that it would be nice to go crazy for a while, to check myself into a mental asylum and have nothing to think of but what I wanted to. And then I thought: //that's just another way of wishing that you didn't have to make any choices.//\n\n<<back>>
It's like [[swimming]], the way I do it. I just start paddling up into the air. I used to keep it secret from the other people inhabiting my dreams, that I could do it. I thought it was part of the rules. I had to hide away to take off. But then the dreams changed: people found out. And instead of being mad, or jealous, they told me instead that they had always known.
The train out of [[Chicago]] has green windows that turn everything into an [[emerald city]]. I can't think of a single rational reason why anyone would do this.
It's raining out in Locust Point, saying goodbye at a goodbye party, and as I start walking towards my car, there's a [[bevy|gaggle]] of girls dressed like they're out to go clubbing, though it's a Thursday night (//you must be old, thinking like that//) -- and I swear, one of them grabs my ass as [[they pass]].\n\nAll I can think of is how colossally improbable and sort of wonderful it is. The wrong way to feel. //You must be lonelier than you think.//
"Thank you so much."\n\n"For what -- lending you a flashlight and letting you use the Internet?"\n\n"Yes." How to explain?\n\n<<back>>
(//Shes// matter even less to stories than than //[[yous|you]]// do -- I mean it. All that really matters is gender -- the weird magic boys try to weave on girls with their voices.)
Finally we descend to Midway. I stare out the window at lights below. They look just like Christmas lights spread over a lawn, or stars in the sky. I can pick out houses and highways -- how tiny and close they seem. I have to [[talk myself into being logical|the poker metaphor]], to force myself to remember that we're still very high up in the air.
Only small plans succeed, is what I think. Small things that work but grow into great things. An experiment that feels right. A lack of committment. A willingness to throw away what doesn't work. -- Which of these is the right way to look at it?
Shark, mainly, where one person floats in the water and the rest start on the opposite deck. The goal is to get to the other side without getting tagged. Lots of variations, too -- tag two people, have two sharks. Call "shark bait" and everyone jumps in.\n\nBut Colors, too -- a strange game. Supposed to be played with the shark turned around and everyone else starting in the water. Pick a color -- we played by the 128-crayon Crayola box -- and when the shark calls it, you have to come across. He in turn can only turn around and tag you if he hears you splash.\n\nSo the real way we played was to wait until the shark first turned around, and then we dove to the bottom of the eight-feet and waited at the bottom till our lungs felt as though they were bursting -- and then came up on the other side, and hoped some color had already been called.\n\nFloating at the bottom was so peaceful. The surface world only a bright blur.\n\n<<back>>
(What's wrong with me, that it took me so long to get here?)\n\n<<back>>
All I did during the summer growing up was swim; not laps, like you're supposed to, but just swimming. [[We played games]] sometimes but it never felt organized. Each day I'd try to swim the entire length of the pool in one breath, and as June became August I'd get closer and closer. I read a story -- a Choose Your Own Adventure, in fact -- in which [[the main character]] discovered he was superhuman by swimming three full laps in one breath. I thought maybe if I could do one I could prove myself at least better than normal. I never did, of course, but I came close. Maybe ninety percent of the way.\n\nI told nobody about this mission of mine.