Mikey

Part 1 of a 3 part series.
*edit* Finished it. A weak ending, but it's meant to be acted out, so it won't sound as bad.
I'm going to animate (w/clay) a story to it.
The idea for this series was heavily inspired by the Australian artist Adam Elliot ("Harvey Krumpet")

Mikey

My brother had a good friend in the fourth grade, a scrawny boy named Mikey Winkler, who had straw colored hair and wore rugby shirts. They were not terribly close, but Mikey had been coming over to our house more and more recently, playing with our dad’s toy train set, and showing off yo-yo tricks: “around the world,” “walk the dog,” “time warp.” He knew them all. He was very good.

On Halloween Mikey had been walking home from trick or treating, a bucket full of candy in one hand, and his Duncan yo-yo in the other, spinning tricks in the quiet street. He was performing an amazing feat of completing the “Atom Smasher” while eating a fistful of candy, when blinding headlights stopped him in his tracks, and then stopped his heart.

My mother forced all of us to go to the wake, and I remember the large cross on the wall looming over Mikey’s coffin, Jesus staring down the room forcing us all to whisper and remain solemn. There weren’t many other children there, but my brother spotted Ben Friedman in the corner, a fellow Jew who did not understand this Catholic wake business, who was also distressed by Jesus and the nails digging into his outstretched hands. My brother ran to his friend and they stayed there in the corner, talking about Mikey, jealous that he would never have to do homework again, and upset that he would not be able to join them for recess on Monday.

I found myself standing in front of the coffin, looking at Mikey’s white face, which had ever so slightly been touched up. His lips were so red, the brightest feature on his face, looking so full of life compared to his colorless cheeks. He was dressed in a blue and green rugby shirt, the colors of our elementary school. They had crossed his arms and rested his hands on top of a Bible, and more peculiarly, a yo-yo.

It was an orange Duncan, the same one that he spun daily around the cafeteria tables. The toy was scratched, and there was a sizeable chip in it, but it had survived the crash. Mikey’s fingers were tightly interlocked, protecting his prized possession. Mikey would forever be remembered as the kid with the yo-yo, a boy who had fallen into a fad and took it to his grave.

I tried to look for Mikey’s parents, but I gave up almost as soon as I started because I had no idea what they looked like. I tried to spot a man or woman who looked more grieved than the rest, or perhaps was better dressed, but the sea or tear-streaked faces and black formalwear was too dense. I wondered how Mikey’s parents had perceived their son. He hadn’t been good at sports, and he wasn’t known for his brains. He was eight years old. What else did he have going for him?

Austin

            I hear the gravel crunch as Austin passes swiftly on his skateboard. His backpack is slung loosely over one shoulder, and as his body fades I see the back pocket unzipped, a black pencil case threatening to spill out. It balances carefully on the edge of the zipper, gently bobbing up and down as it continues on its journey. My eyes wander down his body, his tight jeans growing smaller, his shape gradually becoming less perfect and more blurred as he skates down the street.

            I trip on the sidewalk. I hear a girl click her tongue as I balance myself on the uneven concrete. She has dark brown hair, orange skin, and black leggings that seem to be painted on squeezing her thighs. She rolls eyes at me before she turns her head, watching Austin shrink. Her makeup’s all wrong. Her eye shadow’s smudged. She’s wearing too much concealer.

            She waves to Austin, her cold expression cracking into desperation. He does not turn. She calls to him, once, “Hey!’ His body is a speck in the distance. Again, louder, “Hey!” His body is microscopic.

            When I pass her, I glare. She catches my look, and bumps me with her purse. I let my fingers wrap and tug around its long leather handles, and then she is picking up mascara from the sidewalk, hissing at me, spitting out colorful words. I am a slut. I am a bitch.

            I think about the last time I saw Austin. In class, his friend with the blond curly hair nudges him in the side, chiding him for not coming out the weekend before. He’s whipped, tied down to his girlfriend. Austin smiles nervously. Is he going to marry her? No, he laughs, of course not, his hands twisting and turning, his fingers winding into the loose threads from a tear at the bottom of his jeans.

            My mind wanders as I turn the corner, reaching the front steps to my apartment. I walk upstairs and immediately crawl in bed with my shoes still on, and wrap my arms around Patrick, who is wrapped under the covers snoring lightly. My hands caress his bare chest and I smell his hair, which always smells of jasmine. He mumbles a bit, and turns his body to face me, half-opening his eyes, groggily looking at me. I ask him to promise to never fool around with another woman. He does. I ask him to promise to continue loving me. He does. I ask him to promise to never to marry me. He does.

The Artist on being an Artist

Huh. Writing this for class, but figure it is shareable.

Personal Essay.

Creative non fiction? Well, not that creative.

I don’t think that my parents would have predicted that they would have a child in art school. My father, a technological man, and my mother, who spent most of my childhood as a stay-at-home mom, can hardly be considered the artistic type. They never enrolled me in an art class, or encouraged me to pursue creative outlets. Instead, they forced my non-athletic, twiggy self into six years of little-league softball. In high school, they hung their heads in shame as I traded in my catcher’s gear for play scripts. They winced when I asked for rides to art shows. My senior year, my dad scolded me for not taking calculus.

 By the time I applied for college, it was clear that things weren’t going to change. While they were relieved that I was hesitant to make a career out of the fine arts, I remember the exasperated expression on my father’s face when I told him that I wanted to pursue animation and filmmaking. It was only with my keen knowledge of the film industry, as I recklessly pulled up numbers and gross figures, that my parents grudgingly accepted the fact that I could pursue art and make money—if I were lucky.

Because I didn’t have much support from my parents, art was something that I had to completely self-teach. I found my inspiration mostly through contemporary filmmakers, practically idolizing directors such as Stephen Spielberg, Geoerge Lucas, John Hughes, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and Hayao Miyazaki. Above all, I worship the senior creative team at Pixar. Most of my daydreams revolve around working along side with John Lasseter, grabbing lunch with Andrew Stanton, and just chillin’ with Brad Bird.

Sometimes, my admiration for such people brings fault to my work. The biggest challenge I have as an artist is my lack of self-confidence. I tend to look at such accomplished filmmakers and wonder how I can reach their levels, both in quality and conceptually. I know it is nonsensical to compare myself to such famed people, but it is in my nature to push myself beyond my natural limits, to have grandiose aspirations for my work and goals set so high that even some of the most famed people in the industry have not reached them.

In the end, I just want to be a storyteller. I want to explore the dark, complex sides of humanity. I’m interested in the motivation and psychology behind emotion, especially mixed feelings like anticipation and disappointment. I want to pursue the ideas of luck and karma, and I would like to find out if fate really exists. I like to experiment with various forms of animation, so I can tell stories about people in surreal and abstract ways. I would like to be a formalist who does not abandon meaning, and a postmodernist with hope for humanity, a hope that is buried under all my discontent.

Despite negative feelings, however, I feel that I have succeeded at finding out who I am, not just as an artist, but as an individual as well. I know what values I hold, and how I would like my art to portray such ideals. At this point, I am only struggling to find a comfortable method for doing so. I have While I see myself as a pessimist, I do believe that I will be able to solve such a problem.

Sometimes, I like to put my artistic identity crisis aside. For now, I continue to bemuse my parents, thriving in my uncertainties and insecurities, watching them squirm, smiling slyly to myself.

Favorite time of day: 4 - 7 pm, late summer afternoons.

Man I am not liking this at all, 'cept the last few lines. Oh well. 

New vignette.

And The Trees Glow

            It’s the late afternoon, and the sun grows tired and languid, yawning as it slowly descends behind the trees, flares dulling from a crisp yellow to a sultry orange. The shadows grow, stretching forever, the dirt road sprouting freckles, spotted by bursts of light and dark imprints, the light blocked by the leaves and the squirrels. And the leaves! The leaves glow, illuminate, a transfixing emerald green. They glow with passion! They glow with radiance! They glow and the squirrels scurry across the branches, and as the tree shakes, the leaves whisper, tell secrets, giggle faintly. Cicadas stretch and flutter their wings, bothered by the heat, awakened by the orange air, begin chirping oooooAAAAA oooooAAAAA oooooAAAAA. And the cicadas yearn for love, and summer yearns for love, and humanity yearns for love.

Excerpts

I just read Dave Eggers' biography A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and found that there was a lot in it that I could relate to, on a weird level. Eggers grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I can see the mark that has left on him.

Lately, when I've been reading, I've been marking up books by writing in the margins, underlining sentences, and circling entire passages that are particularly striking to me. Sadly, I checked this book out from the library, so I had to restrain myself from writing in it. I did end up dog-earring two passages, and now I will share them below.

Page 76.

"We grew up in a tightfisted house, where there was no allowance, where asking for $5 from our father elicited the heaviest of sighs, required detailed plans for repayment. Our mother was far worse--would not even shop in Lake Forest, where everything was overpriced, would instead drive ten, twenty, thirty miles to Marshall's, to T.J. Maxx, for bargains, for bulk. Once a year we'd all pile into the Pinto and would drive to a place on the west side of Chicago, Sinofsky's, where for $4, $5 each we'd buy dozens of slightly flawed rugby shirts, holes here and there, extra buttons, collars ruined by bleach, pink bleeding into white. We grew up with a weird kind of cognitive dissonance; we knew we lived in a nice town--our cousins out East often made that point to us--but then, if this was true, why was our mother always fretting aloud about not having money to buy staples? "How will I even buy milk tomorrow?" she would yell at him from the kitchen. Our father, who was out of work a year here, a year there, never seemed impressed with her worry; he seemed to have it all worked out. Still, we were ready for and expected sudden indigence, to be forced out of the house in the middle of the night and into one of the apartments on the highway, at the edge of town. To become on of those kids."

Page. 201

". . . my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring. NOt that you can always tell the self-obsessed. The best sort of self-obsessed person isn't outwardly so. But they're doing something more public than not, making sure people know that they're doing it, or will know about it sooner or later. I guarantee that the applicants for The Real World--I guarantee that if you put all these tapes in a time capsule and opened it in twenty years, you'd find that these are the people who are, in one way or another, running the world--at the very least, they'll be the most visible segment of the demographic. Because we've grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think about how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible. And thus, there is a lot of talking about it all-surely the cultural output of this time will reflect that--there'll be a lot of talking, whole movies full of talking, talking about talking, ruminating about talking about wondering, about our place, our wants and obligations--the blathering of the belle époque, you know. Environmentally reinforced solipsism."

I also hope that some people note that there are similarities in our writing. I don't want to imply that I am as good as Eggers--not at all. But, I do feel, especially when I read this, that my style is very much in the same vein as his, and that made me kind of happy. I loved what I read here, and it brings me joy to know that without trying desperately, I've created format to my writing that parallels great, wonderful writers whom intrigue me, make me think. 

Weekly Musing

Haven't done this in a while.

Weekly Musing:

"The average person only goes to one funeral during their childhood (birth-18) and then one every three years until they're fifty."

In my childhood, I have attended four funerals, and four wakes.

In my adulthood, which has only spanned two years, I have attended two funerals.

I've been a pallbearer. I've been asked if I've wanted to say a few words, (but haven't actually done so.)

I've been to a dog's funeral.

I've never been to a wedding.

Is this a trend, or is there such a thing as fate?

I saw a stuffed tiger on the street today.

It inspired this.

Needs work, I know.

The Prince on the Median

The stuffed tiger lay in the middle of the road, on the flat median, just short of the left-turn lane. It was dirty and faded. Its orange back was bleached yellow from the sun, and the black stripes were a dull gray, and the gray spread into the white fur hugging the tiger’s jawline. It lay there so helplessly, so quietly. It paid no attention to the cars, refusing to rock gently as the vehicles breezed by, the artificial wind barely ruffling the tiger’s faux whiskers.

            It lay there in the aftermath of father’s rage, or mother’s, or brother, or even grandma. He was stressed, on edge. She was nervous, waiting on the results for something important, something that daughter and her tiger couldn’t understand. So the girl sang to her tiger, called him her prince, brushed his matted, dull fur. Father or mother, hands shaking, asking daughter to be a little more quiet, asking again and again, took her prince and flung him out the window, and daughter’s tears only made it worse.

            There was the possibility that there was no rage, or stress. There were no results and there wasn’t anything important for daughter to not understand. She had rolled the window down; let tiger’s snout pick up the scents of the suburbs, substituting for the puppy she asked for every Christmas. He was enjoying it all, the scents, the sounds, the sun, when suddenly the car jerked. It had hit a pothole, swerved to avoid another car, slammed on the breaks to avoid a squirrel—it had been something, anything, but daughter never knew, her eyes widening and jaw dropping as tiger slipped from her hands.

            There, on the median, tiger watched his damsel’s tiny face grow smaller and smaller, until it was only a dot on the horizon, pink and blurry.  Then cars began to gather in the left-turn lane, and his fur darkened more with the debris from exhaust pipes as the light turned green and cars revved their engines.