Just saying

What is up with my color scheme?

Good Afternoon.

Again, no King, no writing.

I'm beginning to think that I may need to rework the layout for this blog, because it's becoming more of a personal blog than a King themed blog. Oh well.

So, first off, let us have a moment of silence for Phil A. Fish (geddit?). He was a noble beast, undaunted by any threats of feline intervention, and was always willing to do some elementary marine acrobatics (aquabatics?) in return for some Fish Crisps. He passed away this afternoon, due to undisclosed reasons (WikiLeaks purports to have a Police File stating that the cause of death was Spontaneous Dental Hydroplosion). He had a rich, full life, and was at least two to three weeks old. We will all remember Frank fondly, never forgetting him.

On to other news, one of our wonderful shift supervisors are Starbucks has put in his notice. He's one of my closest friends at work, and it's really going to suck not having him there. But, he doesn't really have time to feel up naked people and make coffee at the same time (not to mention how unhygienic that sounds), and so Massage Therapy has come first. He'll be here a little longer than two weeks, but for how long exactly I'm not sure; he's staying a little longer than two weeks because another of our shifts is going on a cruise sometime in November and he doesn't want to leave us high and dry.

That leaves the object of his position (I realize, you probably don't care, but, I don't wanna actually bring it up for work so there you go). I really, truly think I'd like to be a shift supervisor. I mean, I realize that it's a lot of extra work, and I realize that there's so much more responsibility and time involved and all, but I really think I'd want to. I was a supervisor at the coffee shop I used to work at, and I really liked that. It's not as much the pay increase (although I'd certainly not turn that down), it's more the fact that I'd feel like I was more involved in the store, like more depended on me, that I was more important to the store (needing to feel important seems to be a running theme in my life). Also, I guess I'm really looking for the recognition, you know? It would be like a "Hey, Matt, we think you're doing a great job and we really value you here!" I just have always had a problem with self confidence and all that jazz, and so, were they to offer me the position, that would just be wonderful. Unfortunately, I really don't think I will be, and it was probably foolish on my part to even think that they would. Assuming that the manager will even be trying to fill the position, there are other people that are there that would probably be interested in the job, that have been there longer than I have and are probably considered better employees than me. I just kinda needed to vent about it and such. But it's not a big deal.

So, sorry for the personal-ness/weird-ness.

Hey, Whomever.

Hello there.

It's been a good while since I've posted anything on here. Well, nearly 5 months, to be exact.

I'm sorry.

I just got really busy, what with school, and work, and...well, you don't want to hear any of this.

The point is that I had been posting and then I hadn't. Not there are any people out there that ever really did read this regularly, to whom my seeming disappearance would mean a great deal, but still. I feel like I owe the blog, and myself, an explanation. Or at least an apology.

I haven't read much (read: any) Stephen King since that post. Nor have I done much writing. I seem to be in the habit of living in waves. I'll go through periods of intense interest for a while, and then get completely super-interested in something entirely different. I'm only Human (so they've told me). I don't know that it's necessarily a problem; I do truly like Stephen King, and I did have fun writing those short bits of fiction, but there's really no reason for me to expect myself to be constantly involved with them. Plus, I really don't think I have commitment issues or anything like that; I tend to be in things for the long haul.

On the topic of it, I have got another idea for a short story floating around in my brain (don't worry, you don't need your popcorn ready or anything, it is simply an idea). Well, it's more of an idea for a short film (short, like tops three minutes). It's an idea I've had for a while. It's (it's NOT music video) a movie set to a Frank Sinatra song, I believe the title is something like "The Way You Wear Your Hat" or something of the sort. For years, every time I hear that song, this idea starts playing in my head. I'm not a film-er, though, so I don't know that the idea will ever realize it's true purpose. But I suppose I could try my hand at penning it out, either in straight prose or as more of the 'screenplay' for this ridiculously short film. So, perhaps at some point in the future that'll show up here. And don't worry, it's not cheesy.

Finally, in case any of you are wondering, the thing that's been consuming my time lately (aside from school an work, of course) has been the Rubik's cube. I've known how to do it for a good while now, but have recently really gotten in to it. Today I just got to the point where I can solve the more advanced 4x4x4 Cube completely independently, without having to reference algorithms. Even with any case (or cases) of parity. It's pretty sweet, yo. Next on the agenda is a 5x5x5. Who knows, perhaps I'll upload a video on here of me doing the Cubes, and perhaps even an instructional tutorial (I've always had an affinity for doing stuff like that).

Well, it's rather late, and I'm rather tired. I just wanted to update.

Thanks, again, to whomever is out there.

I Know...

It's Still Windy

Good Afternoon.

As the title suggests, it's another windy day here. Not rainy though, and it would be (is) warm if not for the wind. It's strong enough that it's making the screen-half of my laptop waver.

Other than the damn wind, though, it's a pretty good day. I made some progress in Russian on Rosetta Stone (Unit 2 now!), and again my English teacher cancelled class, so I set off on my walk to Starbucks. After 30 minutes of listening to great music and bopping along under the sunny, blue sky, I got here.

This post, however, will not be about The Mist. I know, I know. I'll post later today with the notes I've already gotten, and then very well will read and post more. Right now, though, I'm posting a piece of work by yours truly. If you've already been bored enough by my drivel, please, stop reading, and wait for the next post.

I'm posting this one because I actually think it's good. Relatively speaking, or course.

I got the idea a few weeks ago when I was driving to Starbucks at night, and saw a car in my rearview mirror with a headlight out. I started writing it this morning in Chemistry class, and a couple hours and 2,612 words later, it's finished. Well, sort of. I've edited it for typos, and it's done, but it may need another work over (once it's no longer resonating around in my head). But I wanted to get it up here now because I like it. I'm actually proud of this one; it pulls you in, it's suspenseful, it's relatable emotionally, and it's really not too shabby (relatively).

So, here it is. Again, I like it a good bit, and I hope you do. No matter how you feel, though, feedback is always appreciated.

The Headlight

“I promise I’ll be safe, dear, it’s only a little fog. You worry too much.”

Those were his last words to her.

It was a dark April night, and it was foggy out. Very foggy. Warrenville hadn’t seen such fog in innumerable years, although there were certain senior members that would tell you time and time again that they remembered fog like this from their childhood. The fog was like a liquid. It was so dense, so there, that even though it was past ten p.m. it still seemed darkly bright, because the fog reflected back what little light there was. Nothing could be seen after ten yards, except light, which carried eerily well in the fog. Orbs of light from distant cars or street lamps wavered, twinkling in intensity, but it was impossible to tell if the lamp was yards or dozens of yards away.

James was heading out to the gas station a few miles away to get a pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t the closest one to the house he shared with his wife, but it certainly had the cheapest cigarettes. Besides, he could use the few extra minutes as a kind of break. Not that he disliked his wife; you weren’t married for 10 years because you disliked somebody. He simply enjoyed time for himself, and sought out short respites like this readily.

He turned off of his road and on to Main Street. He could see his turn signals amplified in the hazy air around his car, and it was honestly a bit odd for him to look at. His eyes weren’t used to seeing light reflected off of what looked like visible air. Sure, when he usually put on his signal he saw it flashing dimly back from trees, and the bumpers of other cars. But in this sense, it looked like the light was glowing back right out of the foggy air. A right turn led him deeper into the fog; his road had more wispy, unevenness than the fog here.

He glanced up into his rear-view mirror, and he saw one headlight palely shining through the fog at him. The lone left headlight was somewhat rectangular; it reminded him of a headlight belonging to some boxy, angular car one would expect to find in the barrio of some high-crime video game. Something like an El Camino, maybe. It was probably about 100 yards behind him, his only reference point in this the fact that it had just crested a hill. The headlight seemed to hover resolutely the same distance behind his car and above the ground, matching his exact speed. When he went around a curve, it did too, momentarily shifting more into the quadrant of his side mirror, only to swing back to directly behind him, slightly to the driver’s side. He’d crest a small hill, and it would momentarily whiff out, only to blink back to life seconds later.

This car behind him made him uneasy. He wouldn’t be able to explain why, and didn’t even have a concrete answer for himself, but it did. It was that kind of faceless panic children get when they have to trek down a long hallway in the dark, afraid that a boogeyman is waiting to jump out of every shadow and doorway on the way. Or that feeling that late-night commuters get when returning home, that feeling that showing their back to the rest of the dark, unseen world when unlocking the front door is madness, inviting all kinds of assaults from the baddies that are invariably lurking in the shrubbery. That momentary terror when, at 2 a.m., we hear a floorboard creak in the supposedly empty house, and are catatonically frozen, sure that there’s a bloodthirsty invader in our home, and that he or she hardly has anything nice in mind. This kind of fear is the worst kind; it’s completely irrational, we know it’s irrational and could not justify it if we tried, but it simply cannot be argued away.

James felt this kind of momentary panic upon seeing this headlight. He had no idea why he should; surely it was just another late-night driver braving the fog for some kind of errand, perhaps picking up bread or milk (or both). And it wasn’t as if the driver were following him. Main Street was the main street, after all. Still, he just couldn’t shake that silly unease.

He turned right at the fork he came to, and moments later, in the restricted view of his rear-view mirror, he saw that lone headlight swing back to being pointed at him. This meant nothing, though; this road was just as likely as any for the car to have turned onto. Despite knowing that he was being stupid, James still wished that the car had continued on Main and left him on his own merry way. And he could really use a cigarette.

The light wavered as the car went over a slight dip in the asphalt, and as James glanced at it, he couldn’t help but think that the car was closer. He, of course, had absolutely no way of knowing this; but, like the panic, the feeling was concretely there. Perhaps it was that it felt like it was less time between when he and the headlight went over the dip than it was when he and then the headlight went over the hill? Maybe it was minute differences in the size of the headlight? It certainly wasn’t any kind of identifiable normal depth perception; because of the fog, everything was simply either less than about ten yards, or more than ten yards. The headlight, although perhaps a slight bit closer, still fit into the latter category.

Another turn to the right, and the headlight still resolutely followed. The fog thinned slightly here, and he could make out faint outlines looming out at him from the nearby houses. Every so often a dim glow would show that a light was on in a living room or kitchen. A few times he saw dim parade of blue lights, which would have been running parallel to someone’s sidewalk. Past the line of obscured sight, the shapes made no real figure; there was no ground or trees, and the houses, it appeared, were simply abstract geometric shapes that his brain told itself would come together this way and that to make actual forms. Aside from the small patch of road visible in either direction, the headlight, and his own car, he was alone, floating along through a milky grey void.

It was curious that the headlight would still be behind him. The road he was currently on was a very minor of side roads, almost a rural-suburban alley, and he was merely using it as shortcut over to the road on which resided his destination. Certainly it could be possible that the headlight’s car was also using this road as a shortcut, right? Although, he hadn’t seen any other cars out on the road tonight, and that the one he did see would have an identical route by mere coincidence seemed improbable.

But surely not as improbable as the car following me, he thought. That kind of thing was reserved for movies and the paranoid delusions of a schizophrenic. People didn’t actually tail people in real life. Crime was a real thing, though, and it was this fact that kept alive the small spark of panic smoldering in the farthest back reaches of his mind. The part of the brain that deals simply with ‘primal’ notions: eat, sleep, happy, sad, tired, scared.

He decided to drive erratically, if only to get himself to stop worrying. He turned left into a development, and, of course, the headlight followed. He then turned right, kept straight at a stop sign, and then made a right again. The headlight followed, shining from between the dim monoliths on either side of the road, and even seemed to not stop at the stop sign. That might have just been a trick of the fog though; with a loss of a real sense of distance, speed as well seemed insubstantial.

As he turned left out of the development and back on to the road, so did the headlight, and he could have sworn it seemed closer still. He thought he could almost make out the faint criss-cross of the grill on the front of the car. At this point, despite his rationality telling him that it was simply ridiculous to think that someone was following him, he started to breath a little more rapidly, and his stomach felt light, felt as if it was somewhere around his lungs. His mind was dualistic; at the same time as he was telling himself that his fears were completely preposterous, that there must be a logical explanation to this, he was also convinced that this car was indeed following him, and with no good intentions for the end result.

He pressed on the gas, and his car slid up to 45 m.p.h. He crested another hill, and took a quick right, before the headlight crested the hill as well. He sped down the road as far as he could, ignoring the signs telling him that the acceptable speed was much lower than his, until he could barely see the main road anymore through the fog. He pulled to the side of the road, killed his engine, and cut off his lights.

He watched his rearview mirror, not breathing. Ten unbearably long seconds later, he saw the faint angular shape of a car with one stalwart headlight fighting through the fog. It coasted down the hill, not even slowing at the road he was on, and delved into the fog past the point of sight.

He exhaled heavily, and nearly hit himself on the forehead. How could he be so childish? Of course the car wasn’t following him; that was preposterous. Things like that just didn’t happen. He simply shared the road with another car as he left for his errand. Was that so weird? Not at all. In fact, for all he knew, maybe the driver of that car was headed for the same gas station he was heading to; his goal the very same low cigarette prices.

He restarted his car, and after making a rather awkward K-turn and narrowly missing a mailbox (it was, after all, rather hard to see), which seemed to form from the fog itself he headed back towards the main road. He slowed at the stop sign, and with the refracted glow from his turn signal guiding the way, pulled slowly back on to the road. He started to set off down the hill, now only half a mile from the gas station, when he nearly slammed on the brakes.

The headlight had turned off of the road he had just been on.

There was no way that that was possible, though. He saw the car head down the hill, with only one headlight. And there was simply no way that the car could have somehow doubled back and gotten behind him on the road without him seeing. And it couldn’t have looped around; the road that had served as his hiding place was a dead end.

Still, the headlight was very much there, behind him, and although he couldn’t see far in front of him, he felt sure that he would see no car farther on the road even if it weren’t for the fog. This, somehow, was the same car, the same headlight, and it had somehow gotten behind him. In fact, it was closer now than ever, he felt like he could almost see a dull, oblong cross branding the front end.

The reasonable part of his head seemed to have nothing more to say, and that left room for his panic to grow and expand until it was pushing his heart out through the front of his chest on every beat. He felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead and arms, and heard his breath catch. He moved his foot to the right and pushed it down, hard, and his car lurched forward. He sped down the hill, nearly reaching 70 in a matter of seconds, and still the headlight stayed the same distance behind him, seamlessly matching his speed. He would not let himself think that every time he looked up, it appeared closer; there was enough rationale left to tell him that that message applied to the side mirrors and not the center one. Still, he accelerated as fast as he could.

He glanced at the road, and had just enough time to jerk to the left, avoiding another mailbox by mere inches. The headlight didn’t move at all, left or right, and stayed simply at a spot just to the left of center. And it still was getting closer, he was sure of it now. Whether it was his empirical senses or his fearful brain telling him so, he was sure of it. He could see the somewhat solid form of the front end of the car jutting out from the fog, and he was briefly reminded of a boat breaking through a particularly high wave.

He went on like this, slowing only to negotiate turns, and looking at his rearview mirror more often than at the road. The car was closer, he knew it, he saw it, and he had no idea what it wanted or what he should do. It was inching, closer and closer, a dull blue hunk of metal pushing through the translucent, almost-there membrane of the fog. His arms started shaking, and his car started to make rapid waves in his lane, moving left and right by inches as his hands tried to grip the wheel through a film of sweat. In some absent part of his mind his fingers moaned from gripping so tightly, but he noticed this as much as he noticed that no matter how hard he pushed with his right leg, the pedal would not go farther so long as there was a car floor board under it.

He could no longer see the place where the wheels of the headlight’s car met the asphalt, and all that remained of the car was a bumper that seemed to float under one solitary light. The windshield should have been there, but the glow from the headlight was amplified to the point that it drowned out all else. And it was still looming, inch-by-inch. He desperately tried to nudge his car into going faster, but it would not speed up.

The headlight suddenly seemed to drift to the left, and for a moment he absurdly thought that the car was passing him. Suddenly, though, he realized what that must mean, and just as he looked down from the headlight to his windshield he-

CRAAASH.

The Buick stuck the trunk of rather large oak tree, and although a few small blossoms drifted lazily through the fog from unseen heights, the tree remained the immovable object to the car’s very stoppable force. The front end of the car, which had been traveling at nearly 80 miles per hour, had folded into something that resembled both a bowtie and an accordion. The back end bucked up as the air bags deployed, which quickly bloomed a bright red in the fog. The lights on the front end were shattered.

After the sound of the crash echoed out, all that was left was a low purring, as a car trudged by obliviously on the road. Its single headlight fought onward through the fog, and within moments, it was gone.

And that’s it. Not too bad, again, relatively speaking.

‘Til next time.

Another Day That's Far Too Rainy and Windy

Hello again.

So, first off Id like to express my frustration. For some reason the pictures I posted last entry aren't showing up. They did last time when I looked at the blog immediately after posting them. But just now, I got on in order to post quickly before I have to work, and the pictures did not show up. It just had the rectangular outline where they should be and had the little logo in the center that pops up when the pictures don't load. I refreshed the page; still nothing. I opened it in Google Chrome and in Firefox (my default browser is Safari) and still nothing. I don't know if it's the internet where I am (just now it's also having trouble; I'm trying to open another tab and it's taking forever, and the auto-save function at the bottom of the page as I'm writing this is saying it "Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying...", so I don't if it's just that my current internet connection is just not working well, or that Blogger/Blogspot is just not working well. But I really hope that my pictures are actually up there and are viewable. We'll just have to see...

Okay, so I've had another tab opened on my blog for a minute or so now, and some of the pictures are viewable. Hopefully this just means that my internet here is slow and is taking a while loading them to the page. Because if it's not that, if it's that no matter where, through what browser, and using what kind of internet, they'll take this long to load, that's a bummer. We'll see.

It's been a few days since I've posted. I had a very, very busy weekend.

Friday afternoon I was here posting and hanging out 'til about 9:00 (I did get a bit of The Mist read, but probably wont have time to post about it now; maybe I will later tonight). Then, I went home and finally fell asleep at around 11. At 3:30 (am) my alarm started buzzing. I was here at Starbucks at 4:30. After an unreasonably long-feeling 8 hour shift, I was off at 1. Then I drove 3 hours into the mountains to go to a choral festival that my girlfriend was in. An hour or two later, I was back on the road heading home (this time with her to keep me company). On the way back, I got a call from one of the supervisors at another local Starbucks. One of their employees had a bit of laryngitis, and I was asked if I could cover her shift the next morning from 6:30 to 11:00. After a pretty good dinner with of pizza and wings (with my girlfriend, Lulu), I headed home to try to get some sleep before the next morning.

At 5:45, when my alarm was going off, I had a bit of a problem. I had put my work clothes in the dryer the previous night, and had completely expected that my parents (who were my transportation to work) would be up before I was with enough time to put the work clothes in the dryer so I could wear them. My parents, who had completely expected that all they'd have to do in the morning was wake up with enough time to make a cup of coffee before driving me, woke up at 5.45, when I did.*

Due to this, I was stuck with 20 minutes before I had to leave and no clean work clothes.

Luckily, being inventive, I ended up using an old pair of black slacks and one of my brothers polos. The slacks were from all the way back when I worked at Panera, and no longer fit well. They weren't too short (not unworkable, anyway), and weren't too itght in the legs either. The problem was that the waist was a bit too small. So I ended up zipping them most of the way up, and just putting on a belt. They stayed up, and as long as I didn't tuck my shirt in you couldn't see the fact that they were unbuttoned. The polo worked too. My brother, although a good 6 years younger than me, is a bit heavier than I am, and wears his shirts loose. So, his youth extra large fit me (I usually wear an adult medium).

I got to work, and ended up having to stay a half an hour later, because the girl who was scheduled to come in right before my shift ended overslept. It wasn't too bad, though; all the people working were really nice, and their store is a drive through, so wearing the headset was a pretty cool novelty. And their store is humongous, so it was a little hard to figure out where everything was.

I left work, and my mother and I stopped by a store on the way home for her to get stuff for her classroom. I got a text from Lulu saying that she was at the store I just left; apparently she forgot that my shift had already ended. But, after stopping home for an hour or so, I left to meet her for coffee (at a second Starbucks), and we ended up getting lunch while we were out. At lunch, I got a call from one of the employees at my Starbucks, asking if I could cover a shift for him that night. I obliged, not having plans, not wanting to say no, and wanting the extra money.

At this point it was raining, and I had to walk through it back to my car (it was still at Starbucks and Lulu had to leave lunch early to get a rehearsal). I got home, had an hour to chill (and to put on my work clothes, which had been dried), and the head out to work again (making it that I'd been to three different Starbucks locations that day).

Work itself was uneventful; what was eventful was the storm. It gradually rained harder and harder, and then the wind picked up, (literally) sending out outside tables and chairs flying, and narrowly missing a few customers. The thunder and lightning started, and we started hearing that the county directly southwest of us had a tornado warning. On my ten minute break, while looking at the three foot wide puddle river running next to our store, I got a text from my father saying that we had a tornado warning now, as well as flash-flood warnings. Customers were talking about having to drive through hail to get here.

It turned out that there were several tornadoes in the previously mentioned county, as well as the southern part of our county. My mothers coworker in the county east of us had a tornado crest the hill behind her house, lost power, and had the police evacuate people from houses on a few streets in her neighborhood.

Meanwhile, it was pouring. On the drive home, it was raining so hard that the highest setting on the windshield wipers couldn't keep up at all, and you couldn't see the markings on the roads because of all the water. The weather stations said that we were getting 2-3 inches per hour. There were puddles the size of parking lots in the middle of the expressway. It was ridiculous.

And then later this week it's supposed to be 30 degrees warmer than the average lately, and sunny. Crazy.

*This little asterisk means that I have a note. At this point I continued this blog at night at Starbucks after work. I was interrupted by of our regular customers coming over to talk to me, and the Lulu showed up, so I couldn't finish before work.

And that's it for tonight. It's kinda late, and I have to get milk on the way home. I'll actually post about The Mist tomorrow afternoon though; I'm walking here after school and hanging out until I can get a ride home. Talk to you then.

'Til next time.

Skeleton Crew

Hey there.

So, I've begun Skeleton Crew (SC). I've only read the introduction thus far, but I figured I'd go ahead and post; the first entry in the book is The Mist, and it's over 100 pages long (it's the novella in the book). So I'm going ahead and posting what I've got now. The Introduction is only 3 or so pages long, though, so this entry will be short.

The first thing the introduction tells us is something which Wikipedia has already told us, and something I've already told you; that the works collected in this book were written over a 17 year span. One thing Wikipedia doesn't tell us, though, is that there are a few works in here which are previously unpublished (Paranoid: A Chant, For Owen, and Morning Deliveries [Milkman #1]). How exciting.

Then ensues a little dialogue King had had with a friend/acquaintance of his, included to show King's motivation for continuing to write short stories. The friend asks him why he still writes short stories when they flop compared to his novels, and King is like "Huh?" So his friend explains that, even though he got $2,000 for the story, he really only gets $769.50 (10% net to agent, 5% net to business manager, 50% of remainder to federal taxes, and 10% of what he sent to the federal government in taxes to the state government as taxes). His friend comments that this is just about as much as a plumber would make in a week (which King said was how long it took him to write it, but it was really more like 2 weeks), and thus the short stories were net busts.

This dialogue segues into King explaining that when one is a writer, one doesn't write for the money (unless one is a monkey). One writes because one has to; because it makes one feel better. So pfft, Wyatt.

This then leads, in the form of an example, to a brief description of how he came to write Word Processor of the Gods, and I'll be damned if it's not a very similar idea to my short story, Fingers. In WPotG, the protagonist discovers that by using his INSERT and DELETE keys, he can manifest and erase things, respectively, from existence. I'd just like to note, for all you legal beagles out there, I have not yet read this book of short stories and have likewise not read the story itself individually (if it was published somewhere before being in this book [which it was, in the January '39 issue of Playboy], then it would have been current before I was born). Nor am I claiming that King stole my idea; the above comment shows that that would be ludicrous. They are merely two stories which happen to have very similar ideas, and while one write was influenced by the other's style, the one story was not influenced by the other. Again, I had not read this story before writing Fingers, and I'm sure King has never read Fingers (unless he reads this blog, haha, wouldn't that be great?), so it's completely a coincidence. Oh well. I guess I'll never get this published after all.

Finally, in a further attempt to justify his writing of short stories, King makes some analogies. Novels are like long affairs or marriages, while the brevity and succinctness of short stories causes them to be like kisses from a stranger in the dark (I wonder what that would make novellas?). Short stories are good because they're interesting, nice, and brief, whereas novels are rewarding because they become a part of your life. The Introduction closes with King thanking people, and leading us into the book.

That's it for now. I'm going to go start into The Mist, and will probably add more though not while I'm still here at Starbucks.

'Til next time.