169 and North Oak.

I'd like to call moments like this one I'm about to describe as Twin Peaks-ish or Lynchian (David). It's sort of like the bizarre or macabre that surfaces in the normal everyday life of average, everyday people. Here's a good quote that summarizes this Lynchian idea.

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

And so it was last evening as I made my nightly drive home from work that my car notified me that I was low on fuel and that I would need to make a stop at a gas station. I pull into a random place that I rarely go to and I can't even remember the name of the place. On that note, I did pass a gas station on the way to Parkville called Please Stop. Probably the most politely named placed I've ever seen, but it also makes me think that the place is in trouble and they're begging passing drivers to stop.

And so I get out of my car and go through my normal routine where I touch something metal on my car to discharge the static electricity that I have built up over the day, undo the gas cap, insert and quickly remove my credit card, select the gas, wait no go back, select against receiving a receipt and car wash, lift up the pump, then select gas, put pump in car and finally look around parking lot as car is being filled.

To my left a teenager is getting out of his SUV parked near the street, while a female passenger sits. Closer, another teenager with a lanyard hanging across his neck and over his back is cleaning his windshield. To my right an older man with white hair and dressed in a suit minus the jacket is cleaning his rear windshield. No big deal. Normal, everyday stuff.

A second later I look around and the SUV teenager is pacing back in the street looking for something. Something must have fell out in the road while he was driving. The lanyard teenager is still cleaning is windshield. Hasn't this gone on for a little too long, I think. When was the last time I cleaned my windshield? I can't remember. It's not something I particularly think to do unless it's very much necessary. To my right the old gentleman is using that cleaning brush on his bumper. Huh? That's kinda strange I think. I don't realize it at the time, how strange this all is, but I keep watching the man in the tie and white shirt with sleeves rolled up. He's washing his bumper and license plate. He's going over the rear brake lights. I hadn't seen that before, I say to myself. I look over and the teenager is running across the street looking on the other side of the fairly busy highway. The other teenager is done washing his windshield as I hear his wipers drop and hit the glass.  That's normal, I think, I've seen that before. I look back to the old man he's going over the roof of his car now. What could he possibly be doing that for? Dust? Back to the teenager with the clean windshield. He's not done, but I thought I heard the windshield wipers hit. He's methodically going over the corners of the glass and getting the last streams of water. He's being very careful as he glides the squeegee over the glass. Back to the old man. Still going over his entire car. Back to the young man. Now going over the roof of his car. Back to the kid who is now walking back to the SUV, still not sure what he was looking for and it doesn't look like he found it. I stop when the gas reaches $10 dollars. I feel like I'm in a weird twilight episode. Something is just not quite right. I leave the gas station in a haste. I don't look back but I imagine you middle aged business man has moved on to his hood and front license plate and the teenager with the lanyard has moved down to where water has dripped on to the tires and is going over the curves with the squeegee. Maybe it's not weird. Maybe it's perfectly normal. And I suppose it is perfectly normal for people to combine the very macabre with the very mundane act of filling up your car with gas and cleaning the windows.

Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I recently finished Haruki Murakami's memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I actually read his memoir before having read any of his other more famous works. I guess what got me interested in his story was that he decided one day to write a novel. Now he didn't decide after hours of deliberation, weighing the pros and cons and deciding what he would need to accomplish the feat. No, his realization came at a baseball stadium in Japan and the exact time came around the time when an American hit a double late in the game. And as epiphanies go, he decided right then and there that he had to write a novel. So that night he went home and wrote for an hour. And the next four months he wrote an hour a night after work until he had something resembling a short novel. He entered it into a writing contest and the rest was history. The fact that he worked in a jazz/coffee bar for ten years before deciding one day to write a novel also caught my attention. So I read his book about running or rather what he talks about when he talks about running. He started running around the same time as well. Perhaps at the age of 30-32 and he went on to run most everyday eventually getting up to marathon and occasionally ultra-marathon status.

            I've never been much of a runner. I was always consistent but more consistently slow than fast, but what I liked about this book is how he equates his state of mind when he writes to this state of mind when he's running. There's a determination and focus that I'm finding most writers must have. Just as must runners must be focused and determined. There's a certain training regimen that both writers and runners must have to condition their mind and bodies to do these two grueling tasks day in and day out. It's interesting, though, because writing is extremely unhealthy. Right now I'm hunched over typing and if I keep this up I might not move the slightest for hours at a time all the while I'm in my head trying to pull out words. Some could argue that the best writers are extremely flawed individuals who are driven to drink(think Bukowski) and other unhealthy activities. And then there's running which I'm fairly certain is the definition of a healthy endeavor. Actually the idea of Charles Bukowski jogging each morning before he writes is a pretty funny image.

So anyways, I think it's interesting that Murakami balances one unhealthy activity with a healthy one. The balance of the two, I would imagine, keeps his mind and body trained. Ok, so I don't jog and I barely write but the memoir was good and I liked a lot of his ideas on writing and running. He described his state of mind when running, at one point he runs an ultra marathon (62 or so miles), and through his mantra (Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional) and also through the ability to clear his mind, to actually think about nothing, having a void of thought as it were, with only the physical motion of putting one foot in front with eyes set straight ahead, and through this training of his mind and body to upstand the rigors, Murakami has kept on writing and running day in and day out for twenty years.

Rough Draft #2

Write a story about a place you loved that no longer exists. What was lost and what persists? How do loss and location mingle in your memory? What do we hold onto and what does that say about us?

It was on the right side of the road as I drove south and west. Just past a ditch and a 4-foot-tall wire fence, sitting on a small bump of a hill (all alone) was my favorite tree. I passed my tree three or four times a week and I always wanted to wake up early, when dew and low-lying fog covered the ground, and take a picture of that tree. But things happen and time passes and lightning strikes. And one day my favorite tree was gone. It had just ceased to exist. I think what happened was a storm, one of those Midwestern storms that come out of nowhere and turn the land black and ominous. I imagine through a sea of menacing clouds a steady roll of thunder filled the air and a flash of electric, blinding light carried on down to my tree. And through the smoke and fire, shards of tree lay scattered on the hill beside highway 50. Looking back on it now, it was only in a flash of time that I was able to admire the solitary tree. For a few seconds I would say ‘there’s my tree’ (and it’s funny to think but I felt a kind of peace of mind.)  For an instant at 60 miles per hour I must have appeared as a white streak of metal on tires. It was about 55 minutes into my hour and a half drive when I reached this spot just past Knob Noster. Of course the tree is now gone, but the memory and the feeling that I have of it will never fade. Nostalgia can be both a dear friend and a mortal enemy. It can give you happiness and it can also send you into a deep depression with no end in sight. I think the reason I was sad when my tree was no longer there was because I imagined the tree was me at my happiest. Always there through the storms and the perfect days, never wavering, always bending with the westerly wind and always growing up toward the sky and down through the earth.