I Can't See the Parrot

There is a pirate on my bathroom floor.

If you sit on the toilet and look down at your feet, you can see him clearly, a bust portrait, about two inches square, of a bearded man with craggy feautures and a large nose. He's wearing a flamboyantly decorated bicorn hat, and if you study him carefully you can just make out the frilly lace around his collar.

The propensity to see familiar shapes and forms in the random patterns of the world is hardly mine alone; everyone does it, to a greater or lesser degree of awareness. It is a human habit, an ability we share with other predators but take to a much higher level. I believe it is a vestigial survival tool, left over from the dawn of humanity, when the ability to peer into the shadows and determine the difference between a stand of bushes and a pack of wolves was vital to carrying on one's bloodline.

Today that ability is rarely so important, but still present, so the skill has found another outlet: our imaginations. How many of us have lain on our backs and stared up at the clouds and the stars? We see serpents in the swirl of water, beasts with staring eyes in the styling of an automobile, constellations in the night sky, and pirates sketched out in the mottled pattern of the tiles on the bathroom floor.

Mrs. Benson swears there's a parrot on his shoulder, but I don't see it.

Random Access Creativity

First off, let me be perfectly honest: this post is mostly a placeholder to keep my millions of loyal fans entertained while I think up something interesting to write about. I suppose I could just cut-and-paste something out of my travel journal or inflict a few lines of my rotten poetry on you, but you're good people and you deserve some original material. If I start doing that stuff this early it'll become a habit.

A problem arises for me with any creative endeavor that requires regular upkeep: I'm a space cadet. I don't think in linear fashion. I always have half a dozen different projects going at once, yet I'm no multi-tasker. At any given time, I have four or five short story ideas percolating in my mind and two or three in various stages of completion. I also have a couple of unfinished novels, unfinished because I have progressed so much as a writer since I started them that I eventually realized how bad they are. One is slowly evolving into a webcomic, for which I am half-heartedly seeking an artist, and the other is actually a very good premise which will make for an excellent novel once I'm ready to sit down and start over from the beginning. And now, of course, I also have a blog.

What I don't have is any skill at all with priority management. The stories in my head present themselves to me when they are ready to be written and no sooner than that, the average gestation period falling somewhere between fifteen minutes and seven months. The stories that I've begun to write but have stalled sit there until I, or more frequently my wife, figure(s) out why they aren't working. Ideas that take weeks to form will be written in half a day, and vice-versa. It may not seem like the most efficient way to do things, but it works quite well, and I have no desire to change it.

It is, however, very bad for a blog. You're relying on me to feed you a steady stream of entertainment and profound wisdom, and time after time I'm going to be late with the goods. It will be feast and famine, I'm afraid, and all I can do is beseech you to stay with me through the lean times, for tomorrow there will be cake.

Life interference: no penalty!

It is 12:45am EST, June 19th, 2012, which makes today the eighth anniversary of my marriage to a woman who will never figure out that she's too good for me.

We should be celebrating. Eight years ago we sure were; the party started at about 5pm the day before the wedding and lasted a good forty hours or so. But all is quiet in the house of Benson tonight. I have insomnia, as usual, and will be very slow to rise in the morning. My wife went to bed early, because she has to get up at 5:30 to drive herself to the nearest town big enough to support a full-time dentist, where she will undoubtedly have something very unpleasant done to her teeth. I'd drive her there myself, but I'm still recovering from back surgery and under doctor's orders not to operate a motor vehicle, sit up in a chair, cough, breathe too deeply, or blink; I'll bore you with the hows & whys concerning this predicament at a later date.

Yes, unfortunately Mrs. Benson will have dental work done on her wedding anniversary, and then, because it is a weekday, she will come home to a full day of orders, invoices, phone calls, and all of the other shenanigans involved in keeping the family business thriving. Her grouchy and semi-invalid husband has an exciting and complicated new story under development, which means he'll likely be unavailable and mono-syllabic for much of the working day. The sad truth is that I'm probably putting down more words in this blog entry than I will say to my darling wife for the entirety of the upcoming 9-5.

This isn't the way wedding anniversaries are supposed to go. If this were a hockey game, there would be a two-minute call for interference. Life would have to go sit in the penalty box.

But when work-time is over, we're gonna tear it up for sure. Very carefully, of course. Because of my back. In fact, there probably won't be much excitement at all.

Grrr...

I declare to the world my undying love for my wife on this, the eighth anniversary of our marriage. Next year will be better. We'll have a huge party, and you're all invited.

The Semi-Reluctant Blogger

When it comes to the Internet, I may, on the surface, appear to be a bit of a dinosaur, behind the times in all things electronic, but the reality is that I'm aware of these things long before I choose to become a part of them. I just made my Facebook page last year, and this is my first foray into blogging, but I've known what they both were almost from the start.

As hard as it may be for some of you young folk to believe, I was there when the Internet began. I was online in '92, in the heady days of newsgroups and cyber-rebellion and unregulated URLs, before commercialization, when only the kids and the nerds knew what was going on. Maybe that's why I'm slow to jump on a bandwagon these days, because while everyone else aboard is just enjoying the music, I'm watching where the wagon is headed. Remember MySpace? Don't feel bad, not many do. I took a look at it and gave it a pass. It was one of the first of its species to emerge from the trees and walk on two legs, and just like Australopithicus, it's gone now, driven out by a more evolved successor, leaving only a few fossils and a vestigial remnant of its DNA behind. It and others like it only served to carve out a new ecological niche in the electronic wilderness, then from amongst them one and only one--Facebook--rose to apex predator status.

I'm not really a 'joiner' (though neither do I consider myself a natural leader; more on that some other time), so perhaps it makes sense that I would wait to make sure something has staying power before I invest any time and energy in it. I remain wary of social networking, but it has its uses, so now that there is a clearly dominant franchise, I'm in for a penny. I'm still not certain that we won't all be posting and messaging and poking and tagging somewhere else in five years' time; after all, I'm one of the old-timers who remembers what happened to AOL... such a tragedy, watching the poor critter waste away like that. Makes me shudder to think of it.

Likewise, this blogging thing seems to have caught on, so after much obstinance and procrastination, I'm giving it a shot. It's a little strange; due to my dynamic and mercurial nature, which is a fun way of saying I have Attention Deficit Disorder (no H, thankyouverymuch), I've never had much luck at maintaining a diary. The closest I've ever come would be the travel journals I keep when on the road; look forward to excerpts from those in future posts. Only now here I am doing just that, but with an audience, and one mostly composed of strangers at that. 

What will you think of me? What kind of person will I become in your mind? Will your imaginary Anders, based only on the bits of myself I choose to share with you, be anything like the real me, or will he be an entirely different person, raised to a near-corporeal state in the collective imagination of you, the Readers? I can envision another Anders who will eventually become his own separate being, brought to life not by my stories and blog posts, but by the minds of those who read them. 

I've forgotten where I started. Blogging seems to do that to people.

I guess that means I'm a part of it now.

The Once and Future Hipster

Apparently, the contemporary resurgence of the term 'hipster' has its origins in the late 1990s, which means that I was one of the original modern hipsters. I was so hip that I didn't even know I was hip, and if anyone had told me I was hip, I would have denied it. I never heard the term hipster back then, probably because I was so damn hip that I entirely rejected the notion of social taxonomy. I knew what I was, and I had no need to put a label on it.

I had all of the hipster trademarks. I was the ultimate trendless trend-setter. I had the iconic rock band t-shirts, the kind you can't get anymore, the ones from the first tour when nobody had even heard of them. I had the weatherbeaten work pants, the paint-spattered jeans, the ridiculously green wide-wale corduroys. I had a whole closet full of interesting hats and footwear to be worn in organically athematic combination. I was the only person anybody knew who had two chains on their wallet, deliberately mismatched and arranged to hang just so, declaring my ultimate hipness straight from the hip.

Every article of clothing I owned had a story attached to it. Everything I wore was an effortlessly cool expression of who I was. I did hip, interesting things with many different interesting people, and when I told those people about the hip things I did with the other people, they all thought that it was really hip and interesting. I listened to music by bands that were so new they hadn't even heard of themselves, I followed every detail of the local underground music scene, and I went to shows in shitty little dive bars that took great pains to maintain their status as shitty little dives. Everybody knew who I was, and when they saw me walk by they couldn't help but wonder what hip, interesting things I was on my way to do. 

And I did it all without even trying. That's the truth. All I was doing was being myself. It is also true that, deep down inside, I desperately wanted to be so damn hip. I relished my hipness. I craved that hip feeling, and sought after it like an addict. I never pretended to be something I wasn't, but I was always genuinely me in the most overt way I could manage. With the exception of a few good friends, I didn't really care what others thought of me, but I obsessed over what I thought of myself. Mine was a constant, silent struggle of coolly detached self-critique and reinvention, never satisfied with the current version, chasing that elusive event horizon of perfect, zen-like supreme hipness.

At some point in the last ten or twelve years, all of that changed. As happens to all of us eventually, I got mixed up in the real world and stuff happened, stuff that was more important than hipness, like learning to weld, falling in love, and earning money. For a long time, getting was more important than being: getting jobs, getting hurt, getting married, getting by. Hipness, by whatever unspoken name I had known it, no longer mattered.

A few days ago, I was in one of those really hip new-agey stores where they sell most of the unbelievably cool non-conformist stuff that true hipsters use to visually define their total irreverence to everything, and as I wandered among the handmade clothing, African drums, inscence, and obscure subculture memoribilia, I remembered back to the time when I was that young, interesting, totally unique guy who was so hip that he neither knew nor cared that someday he would be somebody like me. I looked at my worn, stained work pants that had no story to tell other than one of hard, strenuous work, at my blank cotton t-shirt that sent no message to the world other than that my only priority in shirt-selection that day had been to find one that comfortably clothed my upper body, and at the leather sandals that I wear when my steel-toed shitkickers are not required, and it struck me that I no longer care what I look like or how obvious it is to everyone that I am absolutely the most me I could possibly be. I realized, no more in words than I had defined it in the first place, that I was no longer hip, and had no desire to be.

But I was wrong.

Mrs. Benson caught my wistful smirk and asked what was behind it. I told her, less cohesively, more or less all of the preceding, and with her unerring knack for on-the-spot profundity, she told me not only that I had been an original hipster, but that I still am. All of that hipness that I wore on the outside back then is on the inside now. I am now so completely myself that I am no longer concerned with being me. I no longer crave that hipness, she told me, because now I have it, all of it, all of the time. Somehow, without trying, I have become the hipsterian ideal, a hipster so hip that hipness is no longer necessary. I am supremely hip.

And the best part is that I don't even care.

It Begins (read first, or just jump right in)

My name is Anders Benson. Remember that; it may be important later.

I am a writer. At the time of this post, I am at the threshold of my career. From time to time, I may make reference to a story that I've had published in the past, or one that is slated for publishing, but self-promotion is only a secondary aim of this blog. I have no clearly defined objective for this project--there will be no theme, no unifying element, no regular schedule. Hopefully those of you who read it will understand and forgive when there are long gaps without activity, just as you will relish the inevitable flurries of posts that will come one right after another during my manic phases.

I will make no further attempt to explain or apologize for myself. I am who and what I am, and unless noted as opinion or fiction (or blatantly obviously so), everything I write on this blog is the truth as I see it.

Enjoy.