Author: Jackson Palmer

I feel really great.  I’m happy, and I don’t really know why.  Nothing has really happened to make me feel like this, but I just do regardless of reason.  Last week, I don’t know why, but I felt really down.  People say that you decide the kind of day that you have, but I’ve found that that is absolutely untrue.  I tried everything I could to be happy, but I just couldn’t, and this week, I feel the way that I had been trying to without any of the effort I’d wasted last week.  I really don’t understand how emotions work, and I’d be fine with that if I know that I’d continue to feel the way that I do.  Of course I don’t and can’t know that.  I think I just have ups and downs.  I don’t know why it is the way it is, but it still is.  I think people like to tell themselves that they can control how they feel just to feel like they have more control over themselves than they really do, or maybe they actually do.  Maybe that’s just the way that I see things because I assume that the way things affect me is the way that they affect everybody.  I guess that that’s kind of a pretentious assumption, but I only really have my own perception to work with when figuring out how others operate.  I really don’t know that I do understand how others operate.  I’ll begin to think that I’m not like other people because I’ll think that I don’t like what other people like.  Say, for instance, parties; I always thought that I just didn’t really like parties.  I never understood why other people did, but recently that’s changed.  I’ve gone to parties where I was much closer with the people there, and I genuinely enjoyed them.  It makes me think that I am like others but just haven’t figured it out yet entirely, but that’s not all.  It makes me wonder if some of the stranger things that I like would be liked by others if they were exposed to them.  Maybe if other people tried it out, they’d enjoy watching terrible movies from the 70’s that have been posted on YouTube because the rightsholders don’t care enough to take them because they know that nobody would be willing to pay money to see them.  Maybe more people would enjoy playing old video games on consoles that don’t work with modern televisions if they could try them out, and not just the classics like Mario and Sonic games but games like Bonk’s Adventure on the TurboGrafx-16 which sold really poorly in the U.S.  Maybe that’s just where I really am different, but there’s a chance that it’s not.  There’s a part of me that really wishes people were more different.  I feel like these things are part of what makes me who I am, but I know that I can enjoy what others enjoy if I decide to.  Sometimes, it just seems like if I want to be able to relate to others, I have to hold back a part of myself.

I wake up one morning earlier than I usually would.  The sun has not even fully risen.  I lie awake in bed trying to persuade my unconscious mind into succumbing to sleep once again, but it eventually wins out and forces me out of my bed.  I get dressed and make my way downstairs.  I make a bowl of cereal and start to eat it in silence.  After a few bites, I decide to turn on the TV.  I walk into the living room to get the remote, but I am surprised by what I find sitting next to it on the couch.  I find a corpse sitting there looking as if he is just relaxing.  I stand still staring at it, not knowing who the body belonged to or what I was supposed to do about it.  I eventually decide that I should call 911 and tell them that I’ve found a dead body sitting on my couch which they immediately question, but I have no answers for them.  I finish the phone call and proceed to do the same with my cereal.  After doing so, ambulances and police cars pull up with sirens blaring.  I open the door to let them in.  The paramedics confirm that the body is in fact a dead one though I felt pretty confident in my personal assessment of the body’s state of being.  The police officers questioned me, but I had as many solid answers as I did minutes earlier on the phone.  They eventually put the body in an ambulance which I found ironic and drove him away.  As they drive away, I go back into my bedroom, brush my teeth as well as my hair, and just finish preparing to leave in general.  I look down at my watch and realize that it’s time for me to leave.  I go to head out the door, but realize that I don’t have my car keys.  I check the kitchen counter, my beside table, and just about everywhere else that I’d think they could be.  I look over my living room and see my key chain poking up between two couch cushions.  I grab them, but as I do so, I smell something awful.  I hold my breath, and get outside.  I sigh to myself and hope that getting my couch cleaned won’t be too expensive.  I then get in my car and drive to work.

I really want to be an artist.  I want to be a creator of worlds that are indistinguishable from our own.  I want to push storytelling to its limits and twist it with the real world in ways so that it might as well be reality because when something is indistinguishable from reality, what stops it from being reality.  We use our perception of the world to determine what is real, so when our perception cannot distinguish fact from fiction, the two cease to have meaning because each term only exists to distinguish itself from what falls under the other.  I, of course, am not the first person to want to bring fiction into reality through art, but I was surprised to find one place where this has been attempted.  Professional wrestling is an art form that typically attempts to stay as believable as reality.  Within wrestling there is a code called Kayfabe.  It basically means that if two wrestlers have an onscreen rivalry, that rivalry has to be artificially extended into the real world.  The two people cannot be seen having lunch together because that would break the illusion.  They are understood to be playing characters, but the separation between a performer and their character is much looser in the world of wrestling.  Often times a character is just an exaggerated version of the person that is playing that character, and they can even share a name in a lot of situations.  This makes their real world selves into a part of the art that’s being created through their characters.  I would love to make art that is this intimately bonded with the real world that the two are on equal levels.  A master of this was Andy Kaufman.  He built up a persona for himself as a wrestler that only wrestled women and was “the world’s greatest inter-sex wrestler”.  He maintained this persona in all interviews and convinced a majority of people that this was actually who he was, but it was really all just for the sake of comedy.  Most of the women he “wrestled” were in on the joke and weren’t actually hurt, but the audience did not know this.  Reality is determined by what the audience is allowed to know.  Another example of twisting reality and fiction comes with the book series, “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.  The series is credited to Lemony Snicket though the author’s real name is Daniel Handler.   Lemony Snicket is a character within the world of the series, and this character is expanded upon in other books.  Within the world of the series, the character Lemony Snicket wrote the books that chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and so the readers are introduced to the books as having been written by this fictional author.  This allows the reader to further buy into the story and the world being created whereas they’d be taken out of it if they saw that the books that the character Lemony Snicket claimed to write had the name Daniel Handler printed on the cover.  All of these examples are somewhat dishonest, but they all serve a purpose of convincing the audience of the stories they are experiencing.  Usually, when experiencing a story, there are certain walls that are clearly marked and never crossed in terms of what is real and what is not, and in books that line is usually drawn somewhere close to the book’s cover sleeve.  When these expectations of truth are taken advantage of, entirely new levels of immersion can be reached without the audience ever even realizing that they’re being tricked into being more invested.

I held a newspaper in my hand and examined everything about it except for the words.  I ran my fingers over the soft, bumpy paper.  I brought my nose close, breathed in, and could smell something almost sweet.  I looked over the letters printed in crisp black ink.  I didn’t read them, but I examined them.  I took note of their sharp, serif font that gave off an air of importance about the words printed regardless of the actual significance of what they spelled out.  I ran my finger over the side and felt the edges ruffle as my finger pushed down and then released them allowing for little puffs of air to be felt by a hand that was held close enough.  I opened it and fully listened to the crackling sound that the pages made as they were all pulled tight against each other.  I looked at this newspaper.  I didn’t read it, but I looked at in its physical entirety.  I could burn this newspaper.  I could make into a pile of ash and separate the individual grains of ash into a million that could ride on the back of a summer breeze into another world and never be called a newspaper again.  The words on the newspaper were different.  They made reference to truths that existed with or without the words.  I could read about a family that lost their house in a fire or the obituary of Seymour Williams and how he died far sooner than he should have in a terrible car accident, but I’d just be reading the words.  I wouldn’t be in those moments where I could possibly change something.  That family’s home is gone.  It keeps burning down and down no matter how many times any person should read about it.  The contents of Seymour’s head will be on the dashboard of his nearly folded in half Chrysler until the end of time, and I can’t do anything about it.  Reading about it won’t help anything no matter how hard I try.  The words will say the same thing every time they are read, and if they don’t, the truth that the words once spelled out will continue to be the truth regardless of those words.  I can burn that newspaper.  I can burn away the words that tell such terrible truths, but all I’ll get from it is a pile of ash.

I bet you were expecting this to be a blog about some dude making juice.  He probably cuts a whole bunch of oranges in half and twists them over a juicer.  He probably winds up questioning life with a glass of juice by the end of it.  I don’t blame you for thinking that.  That’s not too different from what I usually write.  I don’t know why it is that I write stuff like that.  I think it’s partially that I like to try to make people think.  I try to catch them by surprise with what I write, but that’s kind of becoming stale for me.  I’m not sure what I need to do about that, but I don’t want to let my writing go stale.  I think the same reason that I usually write that stuff is the reason I’m writing this, I want to defy expectations.  I think that I’ve set an expectation for what my writing should be like, and I guess this is me trying to break that.  I just don’t want to get stuck in a rut.  You look at authors that get old, and critics always say that they aren’t as good as they used to be because now they’re just putting out more of the same stuff even if the same stuff from before was good the first time.  I really don’t want to let this happen to me.  I have ideas for things that are different, but I don’t know if they’re good.  I guess that’s part of the never-ending risk taking that comes with being a writer.  You never really know what’s going to work, but if you stick to one thing, it’ll get old after a while.  I just gave this a random title that sounded like a title I’d give a short story when I started writing this, but I feel like it kind of applies to what I’m talking about regardless of my original intention in naming it what I did.  I feel like I’ve been juicing the same fruit for a while now, and if I’m not careful, it’ll run dry.  I know that I need to try other fruits, different kinds of fruits, but I’m afraid because maybe the juice won’t be as sweet.  I guess finding out that a certain kind of juice isn’t worth drinking would be better than squeezing the same dry fruit that once held a sweet juice until the end of time.

I held a peanut in my hand.  I cracked it in half.  The fibers in the shell split from the checkerboard pattern leaving frayed edges.  I slid one half into two halves once again and I felt something break between my finger and thumb.  I removed the no longer held together shell from the meat that was within.  As I did so, it became clear that I had crushed that half of the peanut.  I poured it from one half shell into the palm of my hand where it sat in a little pile like a pile of gravel.  I put it in my mouth, lightly chewed, and swallowed.  I then used both hands to pry open the other half of the shell.  When I did so, the nut within was not damaged at all.  I held the perfect nut between my finger and thumb.  Not even the two halves of itself were separated.  I put it in my mouth and made it more like the first.  It tasted the same.  It was still nutty and slightly oily.  It tasted just like you’d expect a peanut to taste like, but so had the damaged peanut.  Why then, would I bother attempting to preserve shape of all things?  What effect has that on the overall experience or at least on the part that one partakes in the experience for?  Why do I bother questioning peanuts?  What do I think I’ll find?  What am I looking for?  Is there something I’m missing?  Is there something that someone isn’t telling me?  Is there something that I just don’t understand, but nobody realizes because it’s just such an obvious thing that everyone assumes that everyone else already knows it?  Do they see me and know that I don’t know?  Do they laugh at me?  Should I care?  Why?  Why not?  Why am I asking a peanut?  This is absurd.  I’d laugh at myself if I wasn’t myself.  I know I would because then I’d know that at least that person has one more person laughing at them behind their back than I do.  I’d be just a little bit more removed from the critical, burning eye of others that I never see but can feel glaring down on me like a white, spotlight.  Do I only pretend to not care so that I won’t feel, or is it because I think they won’t judge me if they think I don’t care?  All I know is that it is not because I do not truly care because I know that I do.  I care so undeniably much regardless of what I tell myself.  I can hate myself for it, but that doesn’t change just how much I care about how others see me.  I take a breath.  I eat another peanut.  Am I just a peanut?  Is life me?  Did life uncaringly rip me from my shell and into the world turning me into a pile of peanut gravel?  Did life carefully remove my shell leaving me whole to enter the world?  Both wound up the same way at the end of the day.  Would he?  Was there any meaning in the peanut at all, or was I wasting my time looking?

Bill was making soup.  He made a broth with tomato paste and water.  It was in a giant pot.  He slowly chopped carrots into bite size cubes.  He shelled English peas until he had a sizable bowl full of the small, green spheres.  He took an onion, cut it in half, and diced one half of it.  He was about to put Saran wrap on the cut end on the unused half but decided that there was no real point in doing so and set it back on the counter.  He then diced a potato.  He then cooked ground beef in a pan with a little bit of garlic salt; it didn’t need to be too seasoned because it was working with so many other flavors in the soup.  After adding all of the vegetables and allowing them to cook inside of the bubbling broth, he added the ground beef.  He then put a lid on the pot and put it on low.  It simmered for a while before Bill came back to it.  He lifted the lid and an incredible aroma came out.  He grabbed his wooden spoon, tasted a bit of the broth, and added some salt and cayenne pepper until he’d achieved the flavor he wanted.  After doing so, he got a bowl from out of the cupboard and scooped some soup into it.  He sat down at his table with his soup and a spoon.  He then removed something from his pocket, a vial.  From that vial, he poured a clear liquid into his soup.  He stirred it in with his spoon.  It disappeared from sight after very little stirring.  He inhaled, and there was no difference to the soup’s lovely fragrance.  He took a bite, and it was as good as he expected.  By the eighth bite, his face was in the soup still and likely to have been cold if it had not been for the hot soup.  A fly watched from the onion not paying too much attention.

I’d like to think that I write because I have very strong feelings and hope that through my writing, others will be able to relate to me and know that they are not alone.  I don’t think that that is entirely true though.  I think that I write for more selfish reasons.  I don’t like that I write because I am selfish, but that doesn’t change the fact that my reasons for writing are, in fact, selfish.

One of these reasons is that I just enjoy the actual process of writing.  I like the feeling of putting words from my head down on paper or a screen.  It feels like I’ve built up something and am releasing it through writing.  It’s not always emotion that I feel the need to release.  Sometimes it’s just a need to get something out in precisely the way I mean it and have as much time as necessary for corrections.  Communication can be difficult for me through speech, and I often say things that I later feel could have been said better if time for consideration had been available.  Of course, conversations and debates can’t have long pauses to allow me to craft each sentence, but that’s precisely why I feel writing is a greater form of communication.

Another reason that I write is, admittedly ego.  I think that my writing is good.  I enjoy the feeling of having an idea, putting it on paper, reworking it, throwing it like a blanket on top of a structure as if building a fort, and ultimately having something that I feel works as a single work.  It’s so satisfying to read your own work and recognize that every individual piece operates with something else like gears in a clock.  This isn’t a reason that I am proud of, but it undeniably is one.

I also enjoy writing because of the control I feel as a writer.  I am able to create a person.  I can develop this person to be as complex and realistic as anyone you might meet in real life.  I can make the lines between fact and fiction indistinct even when writing fantasy if I so choose.  I have unlimited power granted to me simply through the order in which I choose to place words in a sentence.  It gives me an almost godlike control over something in a world where I am able to control little to nothing.  It doesn’t matter that that sounds worrisome because that is the truth, and I can write.  I could write it if it wasn’t, and it might as well be.  That is the power that can be held through writing, and I enjoy it immensely.

(Spoiler Warning for Reservoir Dogs.  Please do NOT read this until you have seen Reservoir Dogs.)

My favorite moment in a movie is a scene from one of my absolute favorite movies.  That movie is Reservoir Dogs.  The specific scene that I like more than any other is not the most well known one.  In fact, it immediately follows what most would consider to be the most well known scene in the movie, that scene being the one in which Mr. Blonde cuts off the cop’s ear to the tune of the song “Stuck in the Middle with You.”  I really like that scene, and to this day, I cannot hear that song without thinking of that specific scene and cringing just a little bit.

The scene that I like is the one that happens a little bit later.  Once Mr. Blonde cuts off the police officer’s ear and is preparing to burn him alive after soaking him in gasoline, Mr. Orange, who we’ve thought was unconscious, shoots Mr. Blonde killing him immediately.  This still is not my favorite moment.  After Mr. Blonde is shot and is dead, the rest of the remaining criminals come into the warehouse where all of this has taken place.  They see Mr. Blonde dead, and question Mr. Orange because he is the only one that could have shot him.  He confesses to what he’s done and explains that Mr. Blonde was going to burn the cop alive.  One of the criminals that has come back in and is now questioning Mr. Orange Nice Guy Eddie says, “Who, that cop?” and immediately shoots the earless, gas-soaked police officer.  That moment is my favorite in the movie, and at the time of writing, my favorite moment in film that I can think of.

The main reason that I love it so much is how many levels it works on and how many previous scenes we’ve seen that it plays off of.  To start off, we know that Mr. Orange is the rat within the group of jewelry store thieves, so we are already waiting to see the rest of the gang figure out who he is throughout the movie.  At this point, we see Nice Guy Eddie shoot this cop that Mr. Orange killed another man to save.  Regardless of him being an undercover cop, we are terrified for Mr. Orange because of what we now see that Eddie is capable of, and we can feel just how far in over his head Mr. Orange is.  We are scared because most of us feel that Mr. Orange made the right decision in shooting Mr. Blonde who was torturing and planning to kill in the most excruciating way available a man simply because of his occupation.  We feel like we might have made this same decision, and so we understand that Mr. Orange probably would have too if he was truly a criminal and not an undercover cop.  Knowing that he’s actually a cop and might be at serious risk of being killed for a completely unrelated reason just doubles the suspense.

Another reason is that we already understand the relationship between Nice Guy Eddie and Mr. Blonde and can relate to it also.  We know that Mr. Blonde had just gotten out of jail, and Eddie’s family was helping him to get his life back together.  We see them talk like old friends and wrestle like kids together when Mr. Blonde first goes to see them.  They are quite clearly very close, and this is only further nailed home by the scene.  We see Eddie immediately shoot the cop that Mr. Blonde was killed for.  We understand the emotions within Eddie.  We understand that Mr. Blonde has just become a part of his life again and has now been jerked right back away from him forever, and in response, Eddie is lashing out by killing part of what he blames for this loss.  He is getting revenge, but we know that his vendetta is not settled because the cop did not directly kill Mr. Blonde.  We know that that falls on Mr. Orange.  This allows the emotion that we understand is there within Eddie to be applied to Mr. Orange to make us more anxious to see what becomes of both of them.  Overall this is an excellently crafted scene and a great payoff for hours of build up that would  still keep the audience invested purely on its own merits without those that it builds off of from previous scenes.  That is what makes it my personal favorite movie moment.

Literature is about pushing and expanding beyond set boundaries.  It is not about doing what has been done before.  There is no need for new works to do what has previously been done because we already have the works that did these things first.   Literature should be able to challenge the writer as well as the reader, and if it does nothing new, it challenges nobody.  That is why comfort zones should not be worked within in literature.

Nothing positive can come from only working within comfort zones.  Works written within a comfort zone will eventually bleed into each other because nothing will stand out in them.  Why would a reader to choose to read any work by an author if they can’t get anything new out of them?  Additionally, why would they risk wasting their own time by reading a book that the author wasn’t even willing to take a risk on by working outside of what they’d usually write.

Star Wars was a very original movie.  It took some common tropes of science fiction, and did something original with them.  Most everything in the sci-fi genre up to that point was polished and utopian.  Rather than conforming to this, Star Wars took technology that was still far beyond our own and made it dirtier.  Space ships could break down simply from getting old and needing repairs; droids were caught and resold in a sort of black market.  It additionally combined these tropes with elements of spirituality, forms of story telling like the hero’s journey, and elements of cultures from Asia to Europe to America.  If one were to look back at the movies that came out from the late 70’s to the 80’s, they would find hundreds of movies that attempted to follow the path set by Star Wars and bombed because audiences wanted something new,.

If you’re willing to work outside of your comfort zone, the quality of your work can greatly improve.  Not only can you discover new opinions about things and offer a unique perspective, but even if the quality of the writing done outside of said comfort zone is not immediately the best, it provides an opportunity to improve.  If you were to shine a single pair of shoes for weeks and weeks they would definitely be very shiny, but there comes a point where they cannot be improved by shining anymore.  Working within comfort zones is the same way.

Shine a new pair of shoes and step out of your comfort zone.