My 9/11: A Retrospective

The Twin Towers always seemed impossible.

From the moment I first saw them back in the Spring of 1996, to the moment that they were blocked from view by other members of the New York skyline, they always appeared to be impossible.  How could something so huge and so enormous be possible?  My teenaged mind marveled at the achievement on display there, the show of man's ingenuity and creativity.  That would be the last time I thought of the Twin towers, for a little over five years.  I look back at it now and wish I had just enjoyed the moment more.  Especially with what would come.

Six years later, I was attending class at the University of Texas-El Paso, sitting in my Mechanics I class.  At the time, I still had vast hopes and dreams of becoming an engineer, not knowing in a year's time I would abandoned the pursuit altogether and begin my long, arduous journey that would culminate in my receiving my degree years later.  But that is a story for another day.  At the time, I was still very much interested in the pursuit of an engineering degree, and still very much trying to pay attention.

And that's when I started to notice something was wrong.

The door was open to the classroom, as at the time, the Classroom Building at UTEP (yes, it really was, and I believe still is called the Classroom Building) didn't have the greatest circulation, and so the door had to be left open, otherwise the room would begin to get stuffy fairly quickly.  And it was through this open door that I saw people in a hurry.  Granted, people normally would be rushing through, trying to get to some class or another.  But there was something different about this hurry.  It was frantic, hurried, chaotic.  I imagine it was probably the closest that I will ever be to actually seeing what people fleeing from a zombie hoard would be.  These people were running, no, sprinting towards the direction of one of the labs.  And what became a trickle would eventually become a gradual flood.

This was the first class that began that day in UTEP, which was about seven o'clock, if I so recall.  Those of us that went to the class had only heard a casual mention of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, but hadn't assumed anything about it, just a terrible accident.  It was the early days of text messaging and internet on phones, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway, as phone reception in the Classroom building was so terrible that phones would naturally get switched to roaming.  As a result, we had absolutely no idea of what was happening.  We weren't aware that outside, the world was changing, and the world was darkening.

Slowly, I began to see a different story of person intermingled with the frantic student: a listless one, who seemed to be slowly shambling towards some location or another, with the frantic stream of students parting around him like water.  The faces were different, but the expression was the same.  Shocked.  Horrified.  Numb.  

I quickly knew that once class let out, once the bubble of the classroom had burst at the sound of the bell, I had to get to a computer.  I needed to get someplace where I could find what was happening.  The engineering lab was just around the corner.  Once my instructor let us out, I ran towards it, becoming a part of the mob that was not running to class, but to try and get information. I rushed inside the lab to find the front desk, where there typically was some overly perky, attractive female engineering student that would check in your ID, deserted.  I turned into the main lab room, and saw that the projector TV, which we never knew we even had, was set up.  

Displayed, on the side of the wall, was hell.  

I won't rehash my thoughts about what I saw.  We've seen the collapse over and over again, repeated in a never ending killer loop as lives were ended in a maelstrom of fire, hate and ash.  We all know what we saw. and were made to see it multiple times.  It doesn't make it less terrible.

And that's when that same shocked, numb haze, settled over me.  

I sat in Computer Lab 2, popped in a CD, Gorillaz, and began to research what had happened.  The CD had a scratch on it, and for that reason, the only song that it seemed to plan with any sort of consistency was the song Tomorrow Comes Today.  It was entirely appropriate for that day, as I looked back on Yahoo!'s now frantic updates as far as what was happening.  I have never been a big news junkie, and yet I devoured everything that was being updated.  I had to know what was going to.  What the hell was going on?

Though we take it for granted that wealth of knowledge of what occured that day, I cannot explain just how utterly chaotic it was in those first few hours to find out what was happening.  Were we being invaded?  Where there other attacks (and tragically, there were)?  What places were next?  And which planes still flying above were still thought to be suspect? What was going to happen?  Where was it going to happen?  I stayed there for close to four hours, and left just slightly the wiser.  It would remain that way for several days, as facts slowly started to trickle in, and events began to be constructed.  But I cannot nearly begin to explain just how helpless and uninformed I felt, even as it seemed the entire world was changing.

Even though El Paso, Texas is as far away from New York, New York as could be, the border itself changed dramatically.  Planes were grounded, and those planes already airborne, heading to other destinations, suddenly found themselves in a strange place, and nowhere near home.  The border, that artery that connects the two sister cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, was shut down, stranding people from their families.  Federal buildings were closed and placed under lock down, and Fort Bliss was suddenly on high alert.  Overnight, my city, which takes a lot of abuse for being boring, or being regarded as somewhat of a backwater, became almost like an armed camp, as every place went on high alert.  This was not my hometown that I was used to, and even for days afterward, I remember seeing a lot more police cars on the road, and the roads being a lot less traveled, as people stayed in.

Along the way to my next class, I remember seeing something else.  UTEP is a very multi-national university.  Quite often, because it is located on the border, it's thought that it was strictly a very Latin American institution, as there are students there from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.  But there are also European students, African students, and yes, Middle Eastern students.

And, in the middle of the corridor, I saw something that stuck with me.  It was a shouting match between two groups of students: one middle eastern, another American, both restraining themselves as much as they could, as professors and later, a campus security guard, attempted to break up the confrontation..  Profanity, rhetoric, and all other sorts of terrible, violent words were being exchanged.  It was enough to snap me out of my fog, long enough to ask a question from one of the members of the crowd next to me.

"What the hell happened?"

"The Arab students were cheering on the attackers, and the other guys are threatening to kick their asses."

I left, my faith in humanity even lower than it was earlier that morning.

Indeed, a lot about that day was surreal, from the way professors were ignored as they attempted to lecture, to the crowds standing in the student union, watching the TV's, the pool tables and other amusements located within ignored.  For the moment, they were unimportant.  

I remember coming home, and just watching the news, watching the destruction, over and over again.  It was horror on an endless loop, seeing the collapse, especially as more amateur footage came in, and news networks decided to air it, showing different angles, different perspectives, different prisms in which we were viewing the lives of thousands being snuffed out.  I remember hugging my parents, my sister and brother a little harder than usual, as I was glad, just glad that my family was together, even as half a continent away, more families were being torn apart.

I've heard different people say that in two years or so, high schools will have the first generation of children that have no first hand memory of 9/11.  I would argue that that generation has already arrived, for this reason.  My younger brother was six at the time.  Far too little to perhaps comprehend that people had died, that people could be so evil to want to turn pieces of our daily lives into weapons, into deathtraps, into tombs.  How could you explain that?  Could you explain that? 

My parents did what any normal parent would have done, and that was to try and protect their son.  As a result, my brother was largely kept in his room when the news was on in the den, watching my anime collection, and happy as a clam by doing so.  And, for a time, he remained untouched, unmoved, unaffected by the outside world.  I imagine many other parents did the same thing.  I don't blame them, nor judge them.  

I will, however, judge my University.  I would learn years later from one of my professors that UTEP, not long after the attacks had occurred, issued a email to all their staff, requesting them to not discuss at all the current events, and proceed like nothing had happened.  Do not discuss what is happening outside.  Just conduct business as usual.  I imagine that the University wanted to avoid problems, namely between students, but I also imagine that they probably felt that the professors weren't qualified for that type of discussion.  So why bother?  All of my engineering professors certainly did so, which is a shame.  But again, I cannot blame them, as they probably felt,  inadequate, I suppose, to talk about such events.  I would learn, years later, that there were plenty of professors that chose to ignore the email, and try and have a discussion with their classes.  There were no riots or problems or assaults that resulted from those talks.  I do not blame my professors for not talking, or wishing to discuss what happened.  But I will never forget that my University, an institution for higher learning, a place which prides itself on being a place where ideas and events are meant to be discussed, interpreted, and cultivated, instead shrank from the chance to do so, and instead chose to ignore it.  But please, buy season tickets to see our latest terrible football team.

Things would remain surreal for the next few days, as life seemed to be in a standstill.  Federal buildings were closed.  Emergency staff volunteered to go assist in New York, as well as Washington.  Blood banks were flooded with people, as were charities with generous donations for those in need.  People, for a brief period in time, stopped calling themselves liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, ethnicity-American, or what have you.  For a time, what divided us didn't matter.  What politics we had didn't matter.  What we thought of one other, what prejudices we had towards one another, what grudges, what petty arguments, what dark thoughts we might have had for each other, didn't matter.  We were just one people who were trying to help those in need, trying to help our fellow man in whatever way we could, however small. We were just Americans. 

In the years following the fall of the towers, I have seen a lot more death on TV, as more men have tried to use evil and death to try and spread their own messages and agenda, only to have said messages and agenda to be lost by their methods.  I have seen a lot of my generation, and other generations, go overseas to fight enemy threats, both justified and non-justified.  I have seen a lot of my generation, and other generations lose countless men and women, who had it not been for the selfish actions of a few men, perhaps could have made an huge positive impact in our world had evens maybe been different.  

And yet, though I've seen ample evidence of man's evil, that has paled in comparison to the evidence I've seen of man's goodness.  Even though we see so much evidence of death, of destruction, we have even more images of people trying to help their fellow men, people running into the inferno, to save people they didn't know, and yet to them, it was like trying to save a brother, a sister, a father, a mother, a child.  We have seen courage, of strength, of passion, which far outweighs the evil that was committed, and will always continue to do so.

On 9/11, I saw what humanity at it's worst could be.  I also saw that humanity, at it's best, would always overcome it.  And it's something I try to remember, and tell people whenever I can.  Humanity is a good thing, a beautiful thing, and though it may be capable of some truly awful things, there is always enough goodness to overcome that.  We just need to remember that, believe in that, and have faith in that.  

Always believe in our goodness.  I will continue to do so.

The Myth And Reality Of The Palomino Blackwing 602

As a guy that loves to draw, one of the benefits is that people give me a variety of artistic gifts for Christmas and birthdays. One of these is examples is a lot of different drawing pencil sets, which I have begun using at home, if only at first to get rid of them. However, there are some great pencils out there that are exceptional to sketch with, my two particular favorites being Staedtler and Tombow.

However, lurking in the corners of the internet, I continued to hear one word repeated over and over again. Similar in myth and legend to the sword Excalibur, the word I continued to hear was Blackwing. As in the discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing pencil. It’s renowned for being able to produce a dark line with very little effort, thanks to the addition of wax to the pencil. Granted, this isn't a unique approach among pencils. I believe the Sanford Turquoise pencil works along the same principle, and it’s a piece of shit. But this pencil was used by all sorts of people, notably artists, writers, and newspaper reporters. Two of the bigger known names associated with the Blackwing were Chuck Jones and John Steinbeck. It’s regarded to be the best pencil ever made.

So when Eberhard Faber decided to cease production of the pencil in 1998, there was a push by Blackwing devotees to get the company to reconsider. Eberhard Faber declined, and the Blackwing went extinct. People immediately went out and bought all the Blackwings that they could find, and boxes of the original Blackwings on eBay are known to go for premium prices. However, the California Cedar Corporation recognized a need, and decided to create a similar pencil to the Blackwing. More or less replicating the original design, CCC released their new Blackwing under their Palomino brand, to great fanfare. Despite those who immediately took to the new design, others said that it was still too soft and dark to truly be similar to the original Blackwing. So, CCC released another variant, the Blackwing 602. This is regarded to be close enough to the original that many of those that had great affection for the original finally accepted it, although there do remain a hardcore zealot camp of the pencil aficionado group that still regard it as shit. Picky fucking bastards.

I normally wouldn't have spent money on this type of product, because the mark up for nostalgia is about twenty bucks per box. However, I did have an Amazon.com gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket, and didn't have anything else I was going to purchase outside of a book. On an idle hunch, I looked up the Blackwing on Amazon, and sure enough, there was an after Christmas sale, plus free shipping, that dropped the price dramatically. With that in mind, I went ahead and pulled the trigger.

The Blackwing 602 is a very aesthetically striking pencil. It’s gunmetal grey, with gold leaf on the shaft of the pencil, naming the pencil on one side, and proudly proclaiming that its “HALF THE PRESSURE, TWICE THE SPEED” on the other side. It also has the signature wide pencil eraser at the end, which allows for one to be able to replace the eraser when it becomes dull. It’s this replaceable eraser design, and specifically it’s clips that hold the eraser to the eraser harness, that doomed the original Blackwing, since the machine that stamped out the harnesses broke, and the pencil wasn't commercially lucrative enough to repair. The pencil eraser actually works pretty well, and you can buy replacement erasers in black, pink, orange, and blue. However, the huge downside to this eraser design is that it means that it is incompatible with a pencil extender, which many artists use because, well lets face it, pencils are a bit expensive at a dollar to dollar fifty a pop. This makes the Blackwing, at a certain point, useless, or just uncomfortable to use.

However, I'm dancing around the main issue at hand, the one that is most important among all of this pencil worship: how does it write? Well, very well, thank you. It's a very smooth pencil, one that barely offers you any resistance or friction, similar to what you get in the softest of leads. With minimal pressure, you get a nice, darkish line, similar to a HB or B lead, and with more pressure, you can get some really nice, smooth dark lines probably in the 3 or 4B range. It really is a fine writing instrument, and for this reason, I can see why so many artists and writers loved it. Plus, the lead is pretty firm, and doesn't dull very easily, a complaint I've heard about the standard Blackwing. I like this, actually.  I like it a lot.

Do I like it enough to pay the full price for it?

No.

Let's backtrack a bit.  It's a very expensive pencil.  I calculated the average cost of the pencil, with the full price of each box, plus shipping.  You're going to roughly pay about $2 per Blackwing if you are going to be a regular user.  That's a pretty steep price for what is a good, but not transcendent sketching experience.  Plus, this is still a pretty niche pencil, which means you are more than likely not going to find it in your local art supply store.  You're going to have to get it from a third party seller like Amazon or JetPens.  For about .50 cents less, and a lot more convenience, you'd get somewhat similar results from a Staedtler F Lead Pencil, or a Pentel Ebony.  The experience isn't worth the extra coin and work.

More importantly, there's this.  Tools can only go so far.  Granted, there is a difference between spending a good deal of cash on something cheap and actually getting a quality product at a good price.  But what makes the tool most effective is the person using it, not the tool.  You can't teach skill.  Using a Blackwing won't make you into Steinbeck or Chuck Jones.  I've seen people do absolutely beautiful artwork with nothing more than a Number Two pencil.  The Blackwing does add a bit of ease and smoothness into your drawing experience, but it doesn't replace the actual skill of the person wielding it.  I'll probably use up this box of Blackwings over the year, and will do so with great pleasure.  I think even the stub of the pencil that I can't use, plus the unique eraser (it'll be intact, as I rarely use the erasers on pencils) will look pretty sweet in a fedora.  But I'll probably never buy a box again, unless circumstances like what happened occur once again.

But I I have one final thought to those that might decry this Blackwing as still inferior to the original.  Just use this new one.  Regardless of whether or not it is a true successor to the original, outside of a garage or estate sale (and I look, trust me) or a eBay auction, the original has gone the way of Tasmanian Tiger.  You more than likely won't ever find the original ever again, barring Eberhard Faber suddenly deciding to reverse course and market this as a limited edition premium pencil, which will likely be more expensive.  Plus, I'm willing to gamble that much of the opinion about the original Blackwing is merely perception, as if a way of maintaining the cult status of what was a beloved, but unappreciated pencil, whose disappearance and mythology has only increased as our memories fade and the feel of the original disappears from our hands.  If you must have a Blackwing in your paws while you create, than at least give what is out there a chance.

Sources

• Fortune Magazine's Blackwing Article
• The Blackwing Pages
• Pencilpedia's Blackwing Article

Fifteen Movies In 2013 That I'm Jazzed About

As a movie buff, I have a ton of flicks that usually catch my interest, in a passing sense.  However, there are very few films that I really get absolutely jazzed up to go see.  Usually, this starts with a trailer, although there are a great deal of movie sites and magazines that also direct me to a film that I might decide to watch.  With that said, there was a list of 15 movies that I was really psyched up to go see this year, and here are my thoughts about each one, from what I've seen on the trailers or researched on the internet.  Hope you are entertained.

Gangster Squad

The first movie I was psyched up over was Gangster Squad, which has a great top billing, with Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Ston, among others.  It's the story of a secret police unit that is formed to take on L.A. Gangster Mickey Cohen, and their efforts to bring him to justice.  The movie looks great, with a prohibition gangster type feel (even though it's set just after World War II).  The wardrobe looks phenomenal, and it looks have have enough cleverly cheesy dialogue and action to keep one entertained. This movie is already out, and will be seeing it this weekend.  Yeah-ya!

Warm Bodies

What can only be described as girl meets boy-zombie, I'm really jazzed about this film.  We have very few zombie comedies that work, with Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland being the only two that come to mind so far.  And the trailer looks funny, so hey, why not?

Pacific Rim

This definetely appeals to the Sci-Fi nut inside me.  Pacific Rim deals with Aliens that have somehow managed to come to Earth, via what appears to a dimensional crack in the middle of the Pacific.  To combat this, the nations of Earth create several giant sized robots to combat the menace, with each one remotely controlled by pilots in a VR simulator.  This movie looks great, and is a bit of an homage to the giant monster movies of the past, made famous by Toho.  It also looks almost like a direct copy of the anime series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, only with the robots resembling the ones from Robot Joxx, and not the biomechanical machines from the series.  Will that deter me from seeing the film?  Hell no! 

Man Of Steel

I'm not the biggest Superman fan in the world, although I do respect his place in comics history, and do love some of the stories that he does appear in with Batman at times.  However, I will admit that I loved the original Superman film, which a good superhero film and was the standard by which such films were made until the release of the original Batman film with Michael Keaton.  However, the character itself has been in a bit of a rut since the original Reeves films were made, and that franchise itself went south once Richard Donner was unceremoniously axed from the second film.  Even the most modern entry, Superman Returns, tried to continue the Reeves' films storyline, to no avail.  This new film with Henry Cavill in the iconic blue and red tights, looks quite good, and plays to the strengths of the character: a near godlike figure with the humility of a saint and the desire to do good tries to make the best use of his gifts in the world.  There hasn't been much in the form of details about the plot leaked out, which makes us have to continue to guess as to what the film is about, but so far, it looks like the Man of Steel will be getting the proper film treatment that he deserved.

Star Trek Into Darkness

The new Star Trek franchise, directed by J.J. Abrams, did something that not many people ever thought could be done with the franchise:  reinvent it, and yet keep the essence of the original intact.  Rather than have it serve as an epilogue for a T.V. series, Abrams instead took the series in a new direction, making it it's own standalone universe that makes it relatively fresh, but also familiar.  The casting is spot on, and each cast member makes sure to pay homage to their predecessor, while doing their own thing.  This new film looks dark, with the potential for it to be nearly as epic as the original second Star Trek film, The Wrath Of Kahn.  Details are still sketch, but so far it looks like Trekkies were right to keep the faith.

Oz The Great And Powerful

I'm surprised that we haven't had a sequel or prequel to the Wizard of Oz sooner, with the only real contender to this being Return To Oz back in 1985.  However, while that movie is regarded to be an unofficial sequel, and also frightening and nightmare inducing, this new entry by Sam Raimi looks to be an actual prequel to the original 1939 Film that is regarded to be one of the greatest films ever made.  James Franco is in the flick as the aforementioned Oz, and overall, it looks to be a visual feast, with enough references to the original film to make a fan like myself happy.  I might actually pay to see this one in 3D.

Iron Man 3

I'm not going to lie, aside from Scarlett Johansson, I was very disappointed with Iron Man 2.  The heart and humor that made the original film so enjoyable were gone in this one, and it seemed that the film's purpose was less based on continuing the story of the character as opposed to further setting up the Avengers film that was coming down the pipeline.  Now that the Avengers has come and gone, the franchise appears to be going back to the personal approach of the first film, with more focus on Tony Stark, the man inside the machine, and his own desire to move from what he was to what Stark really wants to be.  The trailers look good, although I'm not a fan of the newest armor.  But we'll see. 

The Lone Ranger

I was a big fan of the Lone Ranger, and have longed to see a modern take on the Ranger to this day.  I partially got this with Dynamite Entertainment's Lone Ranger comic book series, which is one of the best comics available on the market to this day.  Gone is the lily white sensibilities of the original radio and TV programs, and instead we get a realistic, harsh look at what the west really was, as well as how a figure like The Ranger and Tonto would have survived in it.  This new film, however, looks to be a compromise between the two, with a darker Ranger, but one not completely given over to the harshness of what the west was.  Armie Hammer looks good as the Ranger, and Johnny Depp looks absolutely insane as Tonto, although I'm loving the look, to be honest.  This film has been pushed back several times, but it looks like it's coming out guns blazing in the summer.  Can't wait.

World War Z

World War Z, based on the book by the same name, comes out near my birthday, and I'm stoked for it.  While I'll be beginning the year with a zombie film, this is the main course that I've been waiting for.  Brad Pitt will be playing Gerry Lane, who is traveling the world to try and find the cure or at the very least, the answer, to a zombie pandemic that is sweeping the world.  I'm currently reading the book right now, and I'm loving it so far.  As such, I'm hoping that this film will meet the challenge of at least coming close to it. 

Despicable Me 2

I loved the original film, which was smart, funny, and had enough sarcasm and cruelty in it to appeal to my rather warped sense of humor.  I haven't seen much for this film, but you better believe I'll be in line to get my share of Gru and the minions once again.

47 Ronin

When I took a course on the History of East Asia, one of the stories that I did read as part of the assignment was the story of the 47 Ronin.  It was a story about how a band of 47 loyal samurai waited and plotted to avenge the death and honor of their master, after three years and much plotting.  There is going to be some liberties taken with the story, as it will center around the story of Kai, a half Japanese, half British warrior, played by Keanu Reeves, rather than the traditional story based on Kuranosuke Oishi.  This has the potential to be a epic movie if it is done correctly, and with a great deal of care and attention to detail.  It also can be a beautiful movie to look at, if the standard shown by The Last Samurai is followed.  Appropriately, as the 47 Ronin story is usually told around that time, it will be released on Christmas Day.  You're damn right I'm going to be there for it.

Sin City:  A Dame To Kill For 

I loved the original Sin City, as it was perhaps one of the only films based on a comic book to come absolutely the closest with it's original source material.  Robert Rodriguez (when not making absolutely shitty kids films) was a student of the original content, and the result of this intense attention to detail and Rodriguez' own knack for creating beautiful violence.  This film has been pushed back several times, but rumor has it that it's finally going to start shooting soon, and that it should be in our hot little hands in the fall.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but I'm also not going to get my hopes up.  Rodriguez and Co. have done this before.

The Hunger Games:  Catching Fire

I wasn't the greatest fan of the Hunger Games, and Suzanne Collins' writing style makes me want to dig my eyes out of my skull with a spoon, but the film itself was entertaining enough to make me interested in the sequel.  I'm interested in the concept, in which the surviving contestants from each district are forced to team up and take each other on, and look forward to seeing how the remaining characters from the first film progress from what was an unanticipated ending to the games in the first film. 

Note:  No idea if this is what the poster will be.  Goddamn Internet.

300:  Rise Of An Empire

 The prequel to the film 300, this new entry will instead focus on Themistocles and Artemisia, who took on Xerxes, from the first film, at the Battle of Salamis.  Wikipedia also speculates that the Battle of Marathon may also play a part, which will be cool.  However, this new 300 will also delve into Xerxes' backstory, and explain how he became King.  Not much of the cast from the first film will be returning, but the early production stills and videos on the web make this flick look pretty sweet.  It's very much a man movie, although I suspect that, much as the first, plenty of women will be there for the male eye candy as well.  August is gonna rock.

The Hobbit:  The Desolation Of Smaug

My 2012 ended with a viewing of the first part of The Hobbit, so it's only fitting that 2013 will likely end with the next part of the trilogy.  Anyhoo, I'm looking forward to this, not just to see what some memorable characters such as Smaug, Beorn, as well as seeing how the Battle of Five Armies is depicted, but also seeing how Peter Jackson takes his new emphasis on the rise of the Necromancer in this next portion of the book, which apparently will have a larger role in the events of the film.  It should be a fun ride.

So with that said, 2013 is looking to be a pretty sweet movie season, and my expectations are sky high so far.  I'm hoping that I'll catch enough intriguing indie films that will make the movie going experience to be a rewarding one, and that I'll get what I pay for.

(Not So) Fast Break

Photo by Grant McKeekin, check out his Flickr here.

Basketball runs in my family.

My uncles from my Mother's side of the family were high school standouts for the El Paso High Tigers, with my younger uncle playing semi-pro basketball in Mexico for a time.  My older cousin Chris was a starter for his high school team in Albuquerque, and was quite a good one too.  I remember travelling with my family to his games in Las Cruces when La Cueva would play a local team there, like Mayfield or Onate.  My uncle Emilio was a local legend in El Paso, who often played pick up games against the famous 1966 Texas-El Paso team that won the NCAA championship, and even played for Don Haskins for a couple of years before a devastating knee injury derailed his hopes of turning pro.  His two daughters were starters for their ladies high school team, the Hanks High School Lady Knights, before going off to college.   Another cousin played for his local high school team while his father was stationed in Germany.  My sister played some junior high school ball for her team, and even my brother gave a crack at trying to play hoops.  He wasn't bad, but decided to do track instead.

Myself?   With this amazing history in my family, and the potential for possible adequacy, and perhaps even stardom in my genes, I should have been amazing at this sport that I had an interest in. right?

But no, I sucked hard.

No, that's a bit too harsh.  Despite my interest in the game (I'm a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan), the skills weren't there.  Up until high school  I stood at five feet, had no rhythm or feel for the game, and barely able to control dribbling the ball.  So, to put it a little kinder, I was absolutely abysmal at basketball.  A vortex of suck, as the cool kids on the basketball blogs put it.

Needless to say, I tended to be on terrible teams when it came to P.E. basketball teams, especially in junior high, where coaches, out of disinterest or laziness, just allowed the kids to form their own teams.  Naturally, the kids that were good, or at least competent, tended to group together, creating two or three super-teams  which naturally walloped the out of the five or six squads made up of scrubs.  So, for the month and a half that basketball was organized for that particular grading period, P.E. became an exercise of suiting up in our uniforms of old t-shirts and shorts that were a couple of washes away from being used to wash a car (my uncle coined the term P.L.C.'s for these clothes, which stood for Para Llavar El Carro) and getting smoked by fifty. Yes, it was every bit as fun as it sounds.

It was in the final few games that my particular band of unathletic misfits (who had the audacity to call themselves the Celtics, which may have jinxed the real life Celtics who went 32-50 that season and missed the playoffs), went against the team that had dubbed themselves the Rockets, who were sitting pretty at the top of our makeshift division, with the playoffs set to begin the next week in a winner gets absolutely nothing, round robin tournament before we switched over to Dodgeball or something along those lines.

Predictably, things started off badly.  That particular team had at least two of the starters from the Slider 7th Grade A team, with at least a couple of the bench guys from the B team thrown into their mix.  They could play, and had been since they were kids.  My team on the other hand, could be summed up in the following statement:  we weren't big, but we were slow.   So it wasn't a surprise that after twenty minutes of play, my team was down by double digits.  My memory is hazy, but the point differential was probably in the thirties or forties.  It wasn't pretty.

Things only got worse after what consisted of our halftime, which was generally break long enough to go run to the outside water fountain, which was usually the one fountain on the school whose refreshment tasted faintly like the pipes. Still, whatever was in that faintly lead tasting hydration must have ignited some superhuman gene within our opponents, because we were getting destroyed at an even more breakneck pace than before. It was like watching the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, but with you being the guy this time, you're on the receiving end of the beating.

That's when my teammates started leaving. It should have been expected. At some point, no matter how hard you might try, there are certain things that you just aren't able to do, simply because physically, you can't. In this case, after all the losing from the past few weeks, as the schedules were far from balanced, the running up the score on others, and the current annihilation in progress, sometimes people reach their breaking points. And in this case, someone did. I don't remember the kids name, but I just remember the look of disgust on his face that preceded a quiet, cracking voice, still halfway between manhood and childhood croaking "Screw this."  One moment, he was playing matador defense against the other team's point guard, the next moment, he suddenly turned and walked sullenly, dejectedly off the court.  The dam had broken, as once one person leaves, it's hard to keep other people feeling the same way from doing so.  In the span of minutes, I found that I was now very much alone on the basketball court.

This created a quandary, as the other team and I, were at something of an impasse.  The game was still going on, and coaches were watching to make sure that we were participating.  Quitting wasn't something that reflected well on one's P.E. grade, even if it was the difference from getting an A or a B on an otherwise useless class period.  On the other hand, there wasn't a team on the floor anymore, so technically, how could the game still be continue?  Realistically, I could leave the game, walk away, and no one would have blamed me for doing so.

Except I couldn't do that.  Call it stubbornness,  call it pride, or maybe some uncrushable part of my sense of self that I had yet to discover, but I couldn't walk away.  The idea was unacceptable to me.  Time was ticking, and a decision needed to be made.  I had the ball in my hands, and five other people were standing, wondering just what I was going to do next.

I had no one to inbound the ball to me, I just bounced it once and charged in, five on one, myself against the world.

If this were an episode of Saved By The Bell, or at the very least an episode of ABC's After School Special, I suppose this would be the moment where i discovered some sort of  hidden ability, an Allen Iverson-esque ability of basketball in which I could play in isolation, dominate the game, and somehow lead myself to a comeback.  Or that my teammates, inspired by my stubborn determination, would come roaring back to my side, and through some mixture of grit, luck, and determination, we would have emerged victorious.

But no, I got destroyed, 70-something to 4.  And I was extremely lucky to get the four.  The score would have probably been higher if the whistles not eventually sounded the final whistle for all of the games on the playground courts.  I have to admit, I was slightly embarrassed.  I hadn't expected to do well, although I didn't expect a trouncing along those lines.  However, I do remember feeling oddly proud of myself that I had at least played the entire period, and played my hardest, even though it wasn't very well.

The next day, after suiting up, I passed by the dot-matrixed printed standings of our divisions, which usually told us which playground court to go to, along with where we stood in our divisions.  Out of curiosity  I looked at my team's record, and was surprised to see that we had somehow picked up a win.  Well, I wasn't  surprised, my mind was blown.  I asked the couch if he had made a typo, and he said, no, you guys picked up a win yesterday.

I immediately sought out one of the guys from the other team the day before.  I asked him, what happened?

"You won the game."  He said simply.

"How?"  I asked, confused more than ever.  "You kicked my teams ass, and then my ass right after that."

"You didn't give up."  He said simply, looking at me like I was a complete idiot.  "Everyone left, but you stayed and you still played.  So we went to coach after the game and forfeited.  You earned that win."  And then he walked off, leaving me staring as he walked out into the school grounds as my band of misfits slowly dragged their sneaks to today's latest trouncing (we lost hard, breaking our one game win streak.)

Despite the rather unbelievable circumstances of this story, it is a true one, and I've told it as closely to the truth as a can, for it did happen almost 19 years ago.  And it has taught me quite a bit as I've reflected over time.  That being persistent and confident in one's self can help lead you to where you need to go.  That people will respect the effort that you place in a cause, even if it at times may be a hopeless one.  And that at times, even though something may seem hopeless or dire, perhaps it is better to

Maybe I do have something to add to my family's basketball history after all.  A story about a guy that took on the world, got beaten up in the process, and yet still came out with a victory, in his own way.  This is not going to be a story that will be held in esteem, nor will be told in the nostalgic, sepia tones that the tales of my uncles' hoop dreams are told then and now.  It's a story that will likely die with me, and will likely be forgotten.  But the important thing is that it happened.  And for that brief moment, as I stood in the hallway of the middle school, with the rest of my gym classmates filing past me, I might have, for that brief moment, felt like they did, when their stories were the moment, when they were young, and they were writing their stories on the hardwood.

Taping Music Off Of The Radio: A Brief Retrospective

Photo by Tramavirtual

My office Christmas party was this past Friday, and as usual, a great time was had, with lots of conversation, some drunken observations (I never drink at these gatherings for fear of becoming the talk of the office), as well as the usual shenanigans that tend to occur between co-workers after hours.  Rewind back to three hours prior, and I was tearing open my closets like I was robbing the place, looking for a roll of wrapping paper to wrap my secret Santa gift.

It was in this ransacking of my own home that I found something that had been tucked away in the back of a closet for quite some time, the sheen of dust already turning it's oily black exterior into a sort of gunmetal grey. I paused over this dusty little container, curious to what I had in there and what may have possessed me to keep this thing over the years.

Most of these tapes were made back in the 1990's, a magical time when I went from a awkward, shy youth to a even more awkward, shy young adult.  The Internet was still in it's infancy, and still had it's potential to become something new and exciting before becoming overrun by Facebook and porn.  MTV still had music in between their reality show programming, and Kurt Loder was years away from being locked in a freezer like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man, only to be thawed out when someone big from the 80's and 90's had passed.  The highlight of the video game world was probably Doom, in all of it's pixelated gore and glory.   Woodstock had returned, was hailed as a success, returned again, and went down in a fiery mess of violence, commercialism and Fred Durst.

The 1990's were also, more than any decade in my humble opinion, plagued by the misfortune of having an overabundance of albums that had perhaps one or two really good songs, with the rest of the album being only a hop skip and  a jump away from being categorized as a fetid sewer.  Keep in mind, the average CD price was around $12 to $15.  In 90's dollars, that was the difference between buying a music just so I could have access to the song Sex And Candy, or using said fundage on a tank of gas, a cheap date, some illegal beer for a kick back, or some other tomfoolery that I may have been up to back in those good old days.

Fortunately children, or those children who are young enough to have been born after 1990 or so, there were ways to get the song if you wanted it bad enough.  The first was to see if you could bum a CD from a friend that happened to be stupid enough to buy the song, usually for another CD that you had been stupid enough to purchase.  However, if you were desperate enough, and had enough patience, there was a way to get around having to pay for the song: taping said song off of the radio.   It's a long dead art, killed by the digital age, but back then, and several generations before then, we had this down to a science.  All you needed was a Memorex, a stereo with a record option, and some time.

The process began with calling the deejay on the request line, offering everything but your first born child for the chance of the song of your dreams to be played.  This tended to be a crap shoot, as deejays, then as now, tend to ahve their own ideas as far as what is good music that should be played.  I usually had the best of luck with Glen Garza, the only guy at our local (only) rock station to play music after 1986.   I hated Magic Mike, who played a non-stop orgy of Van Halen, both from the Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth eras.

Second, you assumed the yoga-esque pose by the radio, waiting like a lion for it's quarry.  Everyone had their own positions, usually some bizarre love child of the utkatasana and malasana poses.  Anything that prevented you from developing a bloodclot in your legs that would lodge itself in your lungs and kill you like Finney from the novel A Separate Peace.  

And there you would wait, often waiting through aggrevating commercials (like the infamous J.J. King of Beepers jingles), and at times shifting your yoga positions to something more comfortable, even taping an occasional song that you might have liked and had not occurred to you.  We all even had the songs that we knew and hated enough to use for bathroom breaks, grab a bite to eat, or go do something productive (in my case, usually something by Rush.)

And who can forget those moments waiting by the radio when your musical quarry, finally DID come on.....only to have the accursed deejay start rambling on about how this was the band's new single, how he thought it was awesome, and the name of the radio station before the song began to play. All the while, you're crouching there with the recorder going on your stereo screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP! I"m trying to get music here!"  Especially if said deejay happened to love the sound of his own voice to talk right up until the lyrics began (unfortunately, also Glen Garza.)

True, I did have enough recordings where I could remix two different sections into one complete song, and I acquired the skill (a useless one) to get it to where it was seemless.  But nothing beat the feeling of recording the song perfectly from one take to another, without interruption, commercials, or egotistical deejay ranting to ruin it.   Over time, I had even had a sort of loose network with my friends, where we each traded different mixtapes amongst each other for other music that we had.  It was like Pokemon, but without the stigma attached to it.  You would talk about new bands you had heard, shared music that you had, and just find different ways to enjoy something that you may have been passionate about.  And I think it's this part of the tapes that is why I kept them for all these years.  It was the memories of sharing and trading tunes with friends, and the different memories of a more innocent and simple time, of days gone by.

P.S.  Fuck you, Glen Garza.  I'm still bitter.

The Atrophied Remains Of My Terminated Writing Career

Photo by Thorin Nielson (check out his Flickr here)

I was cleaning out my USB drives the other day.  It's rather tedious work, as it is mostly organizing folders, old school assignments, small text file notes and other random bullshit that tends to accumulate when you are in a hurry or want to write something down on the go.  One of my more hated personal traits of mine is that I do tend to be a bit of a hoarder.  For some reason known only to my subconscious mind, I tend to hang onto things longer than I should, always out of some irrational fear that I'll need it at a later point, but won't have it.  In reality, most of it deserves to be tossed out.  Far too often, what sounds good at the time, after it's had the time to percolate and age, really turns out to have been a horrendous notion in the first place.  In the end, most of it after review is sent to my electronic dustbin, where it eventually, after a couple of keystrokes, is gone forever, blown into millions of electronic smithereens.  In the digital age, deletion tends to be easier, as we lose that physical connection that we have back when people found themselves buried under Andres mountain ranges of tree pulp.

However, upon encountering an older USB drive that I forgotten I had, I was surprised to find out that I unearthed a treasure trove of older .doc files that I had from years ago.  This was my old back up of my creative projects, back when I fancied myself as a younger, browner, Stephen King.  The amount of stuff on there ran the gamut of literary expression.  Old poems, some of which had been finished, but never collected or posted.  Various started and aborted short stories, although a few were finished.   And, incredibly enough, four projects that I was once very serious about that, but had stopped working on, all far enough along that they weren't ideas or short stories anymore, but full fledged bodies and skeletons of narratives.  I suppose the best analogy to describe them would be if you were rebuilding a car, and had managed to get the frame cleaned and straightened out, had the basic guts of the engine installed, as well as some of the necessary components that make a car a car.  Granted, it wouldn't get you very far, but at the very least, there was something there that gave you a vague idea of what the car would have looked like when finished, and perhaps even taken you where you wanted to go (like those junk yard cars that exist to solely take you from one car corpse to another.)

They were never finished, and probably weren't anywhere close to being so, but the story concepts were far enough along that each one had sort of undergone a miniature big bang, with universes beginning to form around the central outlines and ideas of the stories.  There were characters that had evolved from mere shadows that shuffled in and out of my subconscious, having fully decided to step out into the overcast light that I imagine is what the inside of my mind looks like, to introduce themselves and take part in whatever literary whim I would decide to cast them in.  There were four stories that I had managed to get quite a bit of work done.

• Battle Royale - A colaborative effort with Jesse Sanchez, a friend of mine at the time.  We had both read and watched the film, Battle Royale, and wanted to create an American version of the film, using the same guidelines as the BR Universe.  
• A Walk With Death - A random idea of mine, it would be a collection of stories of people, who, in their last five minutes of life, would have a conversation with Death himself.  Not all of them were exactly nice, uplifting stories.  Some were quite dark.  Really dark.
• A Social Experiment - Another odd title of mine, where I took the concept: what if you took a regular guy, suddenly made him the world's most wanted criminal, and dropped him into a foreign country to survive on his wits alone for three days.  I wrote day's one and three on legal paper, with the outlines of day two typed out.
• Like A Song (Working Title) - Like a song was a dystopian/sci-fi novel that I was writing, about an otherwise perfect society that we had in the future, It centered around a young man, a promising cadet for the society's security service/military forces, that wound up joining the rebellion after a great personal loss that occured, as well as how the event was spun.  It had giant robots, various tidbits of philosophy that I had learned, most notably Noam Chomsky, as well as my own various theory about religion, mythology, and other things that happened to pop into my head.  This was my opus,   This work was the most complete, and actually had a book and a half done, as well as some other future sequels finished.

After going through the words that I had once so carefully typed out, dedicated so many evenings to weaving the different threads of thoughts together, a thought came to me.

Why didn't I ever finish?

I suppose, in two cases, real world events came into play that made my once carefully crafted thoughts dated.  I had a falling out with Jesse, and tried to continue Battle Royale on my own.  Then, The Hunger Games was published, and I knew that, with a similar premise and it's own rising sales numbers, a true tribute to Takami's work would not be possible.   As for Like A Song, around the same time as I stopped work on Royale, I discovered the T.V. series Firefly, which more or less covered some of the same concepts that I had been working on in my own work.  And so, I discontinued it, fearing being seen as piggybacking off of Joss Wheldon's work (although I do love Firefly, Angel, and Wheldon's work with the Marvel Universe.)

Before I knew it, hours had passed, and it was now early in the morning hours.  And that same thought lingered in the air, as sobering and depressing as the smell of a lost love's perfume, enough to bring back some fond, happy memories, but the absence of the person making it all the more apparent that the physical presence is gone.

Why didn't I ever finish?

I knew the answer.

Fear.

Fear of being labeled as being too similar to another writer's work.  A fear of being labeled of not being quite good enough.  Most importantly, it was a fear that the work that I had put in heart and soul into, spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on crafting thousands of different cranial synapses together, and something I had truly cared about and was passionate about, being rejected as not being good enough to share with others.   Around 2009, I abandoned any further attempts at a writing career.  I felt that I was too old, and that many of the ideas I had written were already now out in the public.  I deemed that the stories had been told, in one way or another, and that rather have them suffer the fate of being labeled as unoriginal, and savaged as such, I would just archive them and do nothing.

However, none of it is as bad as I may have thought.  Some of it does have some originality, and the narrative is a much different than what I would have thought.  I'm thinking of finishing some of it, and rather than submit it to publish, just sharing it here for free.  For at my best, even though I have a great number of things I like to dabble in creatively, I'm an daydreamer, and a story teller.  Perhaps, just by putting it out there for the general public to read and receive it as they choose to, I'll have achieved both.