In My Mind An Airplane I’m Goin to Carolina

In a few weeks, I’ll be headed home to North Carolina. Thinking about going back to North Carolina brought back a lot of memories. It’s been about three years since I’ve been home. My life has completely changed since then.

When I was 10, my parents decided to move from New York to North Carolina. My parents both worked for IBM, and the company needed to move people out of the area. My dad was effected by the decision, and one of the options presented to him was to relocate to the Research Triangle Park in the Raleigh-Durham area.

Our family got on an airplane and flew to North Carolina to start the transition and look for places to live. I’d never been on an airplane before, and any time we’d gone south we’d gone in the car. It was a brand-new experience for me.

When we got there we learned it had snowed just before we arrived. In New York, this would have been no big deal. But in North Carolina, especially in the late 80s, snow was a huge problem. They didn’t plow snow all that much (and still don’t really). The Realtor wasn’t comfortable with driving around in it, so my dad volunteered to play chauffeur.

I remember looking at tons of houses. Each night we stayed at the Residence Inn. My brother and I discovered The Phantom, which was a comic strip in the News & Observer. We enjoyed the weather and getting lost in all the houses. We even found a house we loved, which was not the one we ended up in.

When we got back to New York, the whole trip seemed like a dream. The realization that I was moving hadn’t really sunk in, even though we didn’t do much more than house hunting. As an adult, the point of the trip seems obvious. But to my ten-year-old eyes, the trip was fun and exciting, a surreal adventure in another part of the world.

A couple months later, my parents went to North Carolina without us. My brother and I stayed with my aunt, who lived next door. I was not happy that I had been left to stay with my aunt while my parents went on another trip. I didn’t like sleeping in my grown cousin’s old bedroom. I missed my parents, and would have preferred to be with them in North Carolina, but I think I missed the adventure more than anything. North Carolina was a new frontier I absolutely had to experience.

Little did I know that only months later I’d be hating North Carolina.

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I don’t know what the hell to write about.

I’ve been trying to keep up with some of the latest media concerning blogging. I’m pretty much fed up with it now.

If you listen strictly to the (opportunistic) media, blogging is about politics and motherhood. What the media outlets don’t portray is the true raison d’être of blogging: having a voice.

Blogging is about putting your own voice out into the world. It’s about creating something as individualized as possible: a window into your own world. People may not care about your world. They may not care about your life, your day, or even you existence. But someone out there cares enough to want your voice on the Internet, and more often than not, that person is you. You could have absolutely zero readers and still be content with blogging simply because you had the chance to add your voice to the world scope.

Some could read this post and assume I’m upset because the media isn’t looking to interview “wanna-be writers who grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York yet grew old in North Carolina who crave apples and had a failed marriage and are now single dads that are seriously dating someone and who live with their kids and works in a job they don’t really want to do simply because their parents instilled a sense of responsibility in them and who has an affinity for macro photography and are by most accounts a little weird and ultimately dream of moving beyond wanna-be writer and actually become one.” Yeah, I definitely could be upset with this. But I feel like I’m in something of a niche area of blogging. A small niche. Probably the only one in this niche. But oh well.

Blogging’s not about stay at home moms (SAHM in blogspeak). It’s not about feeding Rush Limbaugh talking points. It’s not about taking emo pictures of yourself. It’s not about bitching about traffic, or your boss, or life in general. It’s not about advertising porn sites. It’s not about giving TV personalities with already inflated egos a helium tank and a room to play in. Its not about any one of those things. It’s about ALL of those things, and so much more.

Blogging is the simultaneous action of exercising your own rights as a human being while expressing yourself through your own creative outlet. It’s about whatever you want it to be - not what the media wants it to be about.

Yes, I am a WBWWGUITHVONYYGOINCWCAAHAFMAANSDTASDSAWLWT- KAWIAJTDRWTDSBTPIASOFITAWHAAFMPAABMAALWAUDOMBWBWAABO. Interview me, or don’t. Just respect me enough to call me a blogger and we’ll be ok.

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I started writing something on May 10, 2007 (a little over a year ago), and while rereading it tonight, I was intrigued not only by the writing, but by the direction I was going.

The teaser to His Name was John Yates:

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His name was John Yates.

It was also Tristan McGrady, Jerrell Huston, Rolland James, Blair Unk, Allan Spring, Curtis Bould, Merlin Hicks, and many more names - names we have yet to discover. John Yates had a tendency of changing names the same way normal people change clothes or the same way politicians change their minds. John Yates didn’t spend much time in each of his invented lives, primarily because it never took people very long to figure out that John Yates, or whatever he went by in other towns, was so much more than he seemed to be.

John walked into the town of Oxnard on a sweaty May 10th, one of the hottest days of the spring. Granted, most parts of North Carolina tend to skip spring – they seem to move right from a mild winter into summer – so it didn’t take very long for May 10th to be replaced with the 11th, or the 12th, or so on.

Oxnard is one of the loveliest towns in the state, with large shade trees to help keep the humidity and sun from getting the best of us. Of the 8,211 residents, many of the older folk can be found lounging under the shade trees trying to keep cool, usually with an early glass of tea to quench their thirsts.

At the western end of Butner street, around 11 that morning, John walked into town. Now, walking through town is no uncommon thing – the town is said to be best enjoyed on foot. But walking into town isn’t a regular event. And the fact that the young John Yates walked into town wearing a black wool suit on one of the hottest days of the year, something even the older folk don’t do anymore, meant that there wasn’t a person out that morning who didn’t notice that a very peculiar stranger had walked into town.

The man silently strolled down the street, making his way into town. As he walked, he was sure to hear phones ringing along his route, and cars slowing down for a gander as they rolled by.

John made his way to Auntie’s diner. Of course, one of the townsfolk had called Auntie to tell her a stranger was coming her way, so John’s entrance into the diner was no surprise to anyone inside. All eyes were on the young man as he entered, though he did an excellent job of hiding the amusement of the town’s attention toward one man. As he slid into the stool at the counter, Auntie hesitated a moment before walking over to his seat. The man waited patiently, browsing through the diner’s menu, making no notice of the total silence his presence had brought to the little diner.

Inwardly, he was grateful that everyone was more concerned about the spectacle of John Yates than the fact that, on the hottest day of the year, a man wearing a black suit wasn’t even breaking a sweat. But even more so, John was thankful that no one had recognized him. Not a soul remembered the last day that John visited this town.

Granted, no person in their right mind would consider that John Yates hadn’t aged a day in fifty years.

For me, writing is like the government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I create something, even if just a portion of something, and then I box it up and put it away forever. I’m content with the knowledge that I have something of great value yet I pack it away so no one else can have it.

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR on the way to work. The radio host was interviewing an author who had written a book chronicling a person and their life. The author spoke about the person with such authority that I was sure she had invented the man herself. The character had a childhood, a history, a back story, and a moral compass. The author spoke about her character with such adoration that I found myself interested in reader her book.

And then, I discovered that they were talking about someone who was real. I immediately found myself disappointed.

The way this author spoke about her character, I was sure she’d made him up. I had a flash of inspiration for my own writing, and had the idea (nothing new, but still…) to flesh out my characters before I finish writing a story about them. My nerves were on edge with the thought of finally having a solid foundation in the story I’ve been thinking about. But then, when I learned that the character I was listening about had been real (and was now deceased), I felt let down.

For some reason, it was easy to feel passion about a fictional character, but feel unconcerned about the same character when I discovered he was real. Why is that? What does it say about me as a writer? Am I not developing my characters enough? Am I too personally connected with my own characters - are they merely an extension of me?

As I read old stories and old false starts, I realize they characters aren’t properly designed. I’m creating a shell of a person, without filling it up with substance.

I need to stop warehousing my attempts at writing. I need to pull something out of the warehouse and finish it. I need to write less about not writing, less about a character I haven’t really introduced, and start writing an entire world instead of just the environment.

Less trying, more doing.

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