Notes on revision, Essay 2

    This draft lacks coherent and resonant focus. In its next iteration I will remove the parts in the supermarket and focus on the experiences in the car. I am not saying it will end up in this form, but I would like to try it out. I'll focus more on the physical sensations of the experience, and the emotional components, as well as the conversation and relationship between myself and my passenger, my cousin Mike. I didn't like my first draft too much. I put a lot of work into it, well, more work than I had put into my other draft at least, but it came out in a way that was unsatisfying to me. Like maybe it was more technically sound, but it lacked any heart, I think. So I want to correct that, most importantly. The thing I think I really struggle with is "aboutness." I can tell all these stories but making them focused and resonant is a serious challenge for me. Its hard to pick a thing that a story should be about, when its just a thing that happens in your life. Also, I have a fear of rambling and boring people, and I really worry that when I talk too much about myself that nobody is going to care and I'm going to alienate readers. So I'm going to try and get over that, but I'm also going to try and make my reflections concise and pertinent to a central topic in order to prevent my fears from coming true.

Essay 2 Draft 1

I feel like I’m always running out of time. I never have time to do things like fill my gas tank and buy groceries. Somehow those very needed things just kind of don’t make the list, then they’re very-very needed, and I have to squeeze them in at odd hours. For this reason, it seems like every time I’m at the grocery store its late enough that they’re started what appears to be the herculean effort of restocking the shelves for the next day’s business. I haven’t been logging these visits, but I would be surprised to find out if I were always there all that late. Certainly there have been a few 1, 2, 3 AM trips, but I don’t think 11 is that late, and I’ve definitely made it in before that and found the same thing: monolithic stacks of pallets, and the supermarket layout transformed into a labyrinth of carts and oversized boxes, morphing the familiar environs into an altogether foreign, almost industrial atmosphere. The night crew are people who need to get things done. They don’t have time to trouble themselves over appearances. Whoever they might be during the day, with their backs against a deadline, these people become a hive of insects, zealously pursuing their collective goal, and completely overwhelming anything that might offer opposition.

            Disappointed as I was to have again chosen to do my shopping during the magic hour, I held my short list in my head, and made my way around the perimeter of the store, determined to collect only the basics. I was doing well, milk eggs and bread, when I hit a particularly packed stretch of tile back by the butcher’s counter. Just beyond a tall stack of pallets, I could see someone coming toward me, pushing a large hand cart, which itself carried a stack of items the went well over the driver’s head. With nowhere else to go, I stepped sideways into an intersecting aisle and let the man and his cargo rumble past. He saw me about halfway through the maneuver, and quickly recognized what had happened. He smiled in a friendly way, and apologized, though as far as I knew he had done nothing wrong. I said he had nothing to worry about, or something, and he said thanks. And as I took a step back into the aisle I had been trying to travel down, the first thought I had was, “Well, it couldn’t have been that guy.”

            We had been doing about 22 mph for a couple miles when I flashed my high beams at the guy. Just one flash. I had meant it to be two quick blinks but my finger got stuck for a second, so I think it ended up being one slightly longer burn.  A second or two passed, and the hazard lights when on on the car in front of me. ‘Great, this situation,” I had time to think, before they went off again. They had blink 6, maybe ten times. I didn’t know what that meant, but my friend in the passenger seat let me know that the driver in front of me had more or less just invited me to go fuck myself. The driver continued to keep the pace, falling short of the 25 mile per hour speed limit on the long, winding road with one lane going either way- the only direct route back to Mike’s house. With a little bit of an exasperated sigh and a chuckle, I relaxed in my seat and carried on talking to Mike. We talked a little bit about his wife and daughter, waiting at home for us to return with the takeout cheeseburgers and root beers we had gone out to get. We talked about the arcade consoles we were planning to build that summer, and how we would try and build mine on a budget, because I was making minimum wage and couldn’t justify spending rent on videogames, even if this one in particular was a childhood dream come true. Anyway we talked, all the while crawling down the long, dark road that each of us had driven down a thousand times. It ran near the edge of the town I grew up in. I had come back that day to visit, because my buddy, who was actually my cousin, and his wife was taking their baby daughter to the fair in the center of town. Her first time eating chocolate. It was adorable. We spent the afternoon catching up, and I volunteered to drive to get dinner, because Mike insisted on paying. I never minded driving, especially at home. The pressures of driving elsewhere never seemed to get to me there. I could just kind of go where I was going, park where I wanted, and not worry any more about it than that.

            It dawned on me that here, in my hometown supermarket, I was surrounded by people whom I didn’t find in any way threatening, but whom I also did not recognize. I did not know a single one of these people. And because I didn’t get a good enough look at the driver of that car, I realized, hypothetically, any one of these strangers, milling about the cereal aisle at 11:30 at night, could be this person I encountered on the road. A little old man pushed a shopping cart full of meat past me. He kept to his side, I to mine. He wasn’t friendly- he didn’t smile at me or anything- but he wasn’t aggressive, and he didn’t try to use his cart to bully me, out of aisle space, which he might have done, since I was only carrying a basket. It might have been him, or some one like him, but just maybe. Like a 5% chance. I didn’t like him for the role; something about his energy just didn’t match the level of insidious inanity I felt I was up against on the road earlier. I made my way into produce deciding whether or not I would be able to eat a whole bunch of bananas before they went bad, and quietly observing the other late night shoppers as they inspected avocados and hefted packages of celery. They were a motley crew. There’s nothing sexy about picking your way around cardboard towers to sniff at bruised pears under fluorescent lights at an hour when most other people whom you assess as your peers are in their homes reading or watching TV on the internet or holding their lovers or drunk. But despite their low level or wretchedness, nothing stood out about these people to make me suspect they were a dangerous kind of insane. They were clear.

            I wasn’t riding the guy’s bumper or anything. I didn’t honk my horn, not even once. I just kept behind him, close behind him but not too close, and waited for him to move. Coming through a bend, I could see the road ahead was straight for a good stretch. And what’s more, the only car in the other lane was a good long distance away. With no one else around, I decided it would be safe to pass this driver, who had insisted on driving so slowly, and get us home before the baby was asleep and the burgers were cold. I moved left into the other lane and hit the accelerator. I had recently sold my old jeep for a much newer, though still a bit old, Honda. Although it was by no means a racing car, to me it was fast, and I think even objectively, it accelerated quite well. So I hit the gas, not flooring it or anything so dramatic, but enough to move past this person who was holding me up and get back into the correct lane quickly and without incident.

 Much to my surprise, as I had begun to pull past the driver ahead of me, his car too began to accelerate, with the aggressive growling of a powerful engine. He went from even with me, to ahead of me, and stayed there. Much taken aback by this vindictive behavior, it took me a second to really understand the situation. When I did, not fully, but enough to act, I realized I was in a very vulnerable position, at much too great a risk for the potential gain, and quickly hit the brakes in order to move back in place behind the driver, whom felt I now knew to be dangerous and insane. The car in the oncoming lane was now heading toward me, and I had no interest in prolonging our relationship. If I was surprised before, I don’t know if there is a word for what I was next, when,  as I decelerated to move back into the right lane, so too did my evil pace car, which at first prevented me from rejoining the right lane at all, and when I was able to do so, almost resulted in a high speed collision between our two vehicles. Back in the right lane, having heavily leaned on my horn in outrage, I was a little shaken, and more than a little embarrassed that my cousin had experienced that failure with me. I felt like somebody I wanted to like me had just seen a bully give me a wedgie.

[Another supermarket section]

We were almost home when the one lane widened to three, about 100 yards before a traffic light. The guy drifted into the left-turn only lane. The middle was straight ahead, and the far right was straight or right. Now within a mile of home, it occurred to me how pissed Mike’s wife would be about this when she heard the story. I didn’t want to engage this guy or get into a thing with him. I was fighting mad, sure, but I was other things too: sad, and a little shaken. As we approached the red light, I pulled into the right lane. I figured the extra lane between us might be a buffer, should he be crazier than I thought. There was no one else on the road, so it was just the empty lane between us. I was a little scared, but I think I was more scared because Mike was with me. Like I didn’t want to be embarrassed by getting myself into trouble around him. Had he not been there, I might have taken the middle lane. Even so, from the safety of the right side, I couldn’t help myself, and as we drew even approaching the light, I stole a look to my left. The car was turning down a side street about twenty yards short of the intersection, so even though the light was still red, it was only for a second that I saw what looked like a middle-aged white man in a baseball cap, whose car’s interior was clean and sleek, looking straight ahead, but extending his arm at a 90˚ angle directly toward me offering me his middle finger. He never looked at me. It was like he was just doing it in case I happened to look over. He might not even know if  I saw. He might have mouthed the word “asshole,” but it was hard to see. He made a smooth left turn down the side street and was gone. Did I know a kid that lived on that street growing up? Hasn’t I gone to a party in that neighborhood in high school? It might have been that one kid’s house who played hockey and the drums. Or maybe this was somebody else. Maybe I didn’t know anyone who lived over there at all. We continued on our way. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.

Brainstorming for essay 2

    So I was driving the other day, and this crazy thing happened, and on its own its not really good material for CNF I don't think, but then something else happened later, and then I thought that maybe packaged together they could make one.

    I was in ShopRite around 11 o'clock. It seems like whenever I'm there, like no matter what, its always the time that they're restocking the place. Like as soon as the clock strikes 8:00 PM, the hand trucks come out and the pallets stack up in the aisles, and its a damn hedge maze all of a sudden, replete with danger of the night crew pushing huge stacks of whatever down narrow aisles and almost running you over. It was precisely this experience that made me tie these two events of the evening together and maybe make a story out of it.

    I saw the big cart from around the corner of a stack of pallets, and I knew the guy pushing it couldn't see me, so I kind of stepped to the side of the aisle, behind a big box so I could be sure he wouldn't turn and hit me. When the guy came clear of the stack of pallets, he saw me waiting on the sideline or him to pass, and he humbly smiled and said "sorry" and maybe "thanks man" as he passed. For whatever reason, the very next thought in my head was, it couldn't have been that guy. What that meant to me was, the man I had encountered on the road earlier that night, in my hometown, the town  I grew up in, he could be anybody, anywhere around me, any of these people surrounding me right now. They all seemed like decent enough people, or at least none of them seemed like they were too awful, from how they were behaving right now. But because from what I saw of this guy, and old white guy, who looked more or less like everybody else in town, on a basic level, any one of these people could be a complete fucking lunatic asshole, and I would have no way of knowing, and he would have no way of knowing me. And I thought that was an interesting premise to work from. So I walked around the aisles a little bit more and thought some more about the people in them and how they might be a lunatic but probably weren't, but really about how I was going to make this story about driving parallel the story about cruising the aisles of the supermarket.

    I was running late, so I decided I would stop at the grocery store on the way home, rather than before I went out. I had come back to town to visit my cousin, who happened to be a the Italian Festival at the center of town with his wife and baby daughter. We strolled around and I saw people I knew from growing up. The guy who ran the municipal summer camp I used to work for was there. He'd organized the whole thing. We talked for a few minutes about our families, hugged, separated. I went back to my cousin's house, practically in town but actually right over the border in a neighboring town, with acres of woodland separating his apartment complex from the next residential address in what was technically his town. We were spending a quiet evening catching up, and decided to indulge ourselves a little and ordered cheeseburgers and fries from Stewart's. I had driven, because my cousin always insisted on buying. On the way home, we got caught behind a slow driver on a long, one lane road. He was hovering around 24 in a 25. After a few minutes, I flashed my high beams at him, hoping to suggest that he should speed up. I did it once, and I without tailgating him or hitting the horn or anything. I asked my cousin what it meant when he put his flashers on for about ten seconds and turned them off. He said that was an equivalent of "fuck you" from the driver ahead of me. So I kept driving, slowly, behind this person, on what was really the only direct route back to my coin's place. As luck would have it, after a few miles the road, which had been winding, straightened out a bit, and the only car on the other side was a couple miles away. Seeing the opportunity, I moved left to pass the slow driver in my lane. Then, much to my surprise, he sped up. A lot. And fast. I wasn't flooring my 6 cylinder honda, but it picks up pretty quick. This person was to only preventing me from being able to pass him, he was actually accelerating enough to stay half a car's length ahead of me.

    I wasn't interested in playing chicken, I just wanted to get home and eat a burger. I hit the brakes hard, and tried to get back in my lane, behind a person I now knew to be insane. But when I slowed to pull back in behind him, he slowed as well, causing me to nearly crash into the back of him. At this point, yes, I leaned on my horn liberally. But with no other recourse but to take a real long detour through the back roads of town, I stayed behind the crazy man, almost all the way home. At the next to last light before my cousin's house, one lane widened to three, two straight and one left. The crazy man slid left into the turning lane, and I stayed far on the right, leaving a lane between us. As much as I did not want to engage this crazy person, I couldn't help but to look to my left when I stopped at the light, and I was surprised again to see the man's arm extended out in my direction, offering me his middle finger. I only caught a glimpse of him because the light turned right away, and he sped through his left turn and away from us, but I didn't recognize him. He was an old white guy in a baseball cap. Or, to put it another way, he could be anyone's father or uncle or neighbor that I had grown up with or heard stories about or who golfed with my dad. And he was a dangerous asshole. We drove the remaining mile in peace and enjoyed our fried treats while the baby staggered around the living room and cried when we wouldn't give her bacon.

Blog 5

    In order to tighten up the draft of my first essay, I think I would want to look at clarifying some elements of the story that I hadn't really thought of at first. For example there are elements of my family dynamic that are well known to me but not made explicit, or maybe even implicit in my draft. Certain other details too, like things about my dad, including why, as the type of man he is, he would insist on doing an athletic activity like this despite his physical condition. I would like to talk about my family's history at the beach a little bit more. This would be particularly useful in the event that I manipulate this story to talk more about my dad, or me and my dad and our relationship. What kind of a guy he is and what kind of man I think I've become and how much one has been impacted by the other. I also plan to go into, at least somewhat, my relationship with my brother, if for no other reason than to establish that I am the eldest and he is the baby, or younger than me. I'm still not exactly sure what the fine point on the end of this might be, though I have a much clearer idea than I did. I think if I were to work on this piece, in the round of editing following this one I would want to start to try and make my language count for a little more. I feel as the draft is now and as it will likely remain in its next iteration, it lacks some of the tightness, some of the dense word-by-word punch that we have seen in CNF, where the best pieces use every single deliberately chosen word to some effect. Not that I'm near that level, but if we're looking at the best as examples it can't hurt to try and emulate them if you can, I think. So long as you're not doing damage to the piece you're working on. And I hope I wouldn't be doing that.
    I also, in this most immediate round of editing would like to work a little more closely with segmentation. I felt that my draft was reasonably well segmented according to action or ideas, each little chunk focusing on one part of the story, but looking back it really just seems like one paragraph after another until its over. I would like to try to get it to a place where each break has some meaning beyond "then something else happened" or "I thought of something different," if not an even more legitimate significance. Finally I'd like to work with the imagery here. For me the sights, sounds, smells, and physical sensations are a big part of this story, and while I lay on some detail about the scene here and there, I'd like to make those descriptions more concise, and try to imbue them with some significance beyond mere setting.