The Most Bizarre Person I've Ever Met

When I was just out of high school I had decided that the best career track for me would be aviation maintenance, so I enrolled in Wichita Area Technical College’s Aviation Maintenance Technician program.

During my second year an ex-Navy sailor joined our class. He was in his mid forties, skinny, average height, with long, stringy blonde hair. We all found him slightly odd at first, but over the course of the year he seemed to get stranger and stranger. He had chosen a seat near the front of the class so we rarely saw his expressions during lectures, but sometimes he would, well, kind of flip out. For example, one day, during some math exercises, he apparently had some sort of disagreement with the figures his calculator was giving him. Rather than take a break, he got angry, yelled out, and broke his calculator in half, buttons flying all over the classroom. When the instructor asked what the problem was he simply stated “It was giving me wrong answers.”

Other times, during breaks, or idle time in class, he would lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and sing in a normal speaking voice a song called “All My Dead Friends”. None of us knew if it was a real song, and to be honest, none of us really wanted to know. He also often had conversations with the coffee machine, the gist of which depended on how well the machine had made the coffee that day. Having conversations around him was always risky too. If you said something he either liked or disliked, his response was usually the same, he would suddenly whip around, hair flying, stare at you intently, sometimes giving you chills, and then explain his feelings on the subject. Sometimes he would just sit down at our lunch table and start telling stories from his Navy days regardless of the conversation taking place. He especially liked telling us about his times in the Philippines (“I once at a live giant beetle because it landed on my shoulder in a bar. The guy who owned it as a pet was pissed!”).

Eventually he flunked out of the program. For the rest of the year we were sure that, one day, he would back with an arsenal to take his revenge. We also found out, much later, that he had been diagnosed with 4th stage syphilis shortly after leaving the school. So, while we did eventually have a reason behind his apparent madness, he was certainly the most bizarre person I’ve met yet.

Stuck in Dreamland

Did you ever have one of those days that, just before you got out of bed, you were having a really lucid dream that pulled some strong emotional cords, and throughout the rest of the day you’re stuck in the dreamland, remembering the emotions and feel of that world? I’m having one of those today. I’m actually trying to convey the dream into a story on one of my other blogs (the conscious particles literary blog, where I store short stories) but, since I’m not that great of a writer, I have a hard time conveying the feeling of the setting, plus I’m supposed to be working right now too, heh.

It’s times like these that I wish I had the time/money to go back to school to learn how to write. I’m good at coming up with a decent plot, I can move a story forward, but the story is always dry. I’m no good at description. I think part of the problem is, even when I read a book, I tend to just glaze over the details of the setting. I don’t care about the color of the drapes in the room adjacent to the one the character is standing, let’s get on with it!  Then, of course, when the author references some detail that I paid no attention to I’m temporarily lost, and in the end I miss out on some of the richness the story offered. The result, however, is that in my own writing I just want to blow past the adjectives and adverbs and move the plot along at a blinding pace. My style tends to be “this happens, then this happens, then this happens, the end”. I have no richness, no content, no character depth, and I don’t know how to do those things.

In today’s dreamland, nuance and subtlety is the key to the process of the character discovering what happened. It’s a gradual realization that is completely centered on things like the how faded certain fabric covered cubicle walls are. Without the ability to describe the original look of the walls adequately, how can I ever bring the reader along the path of noticing the very subtle change in the look? Then, of course, there is the love interest. The main character makes a decision that has a huge impact on the rest of his life, all over a girl that dies. Without the vocabulary or style, how do I make the reader feel the emotions of his decision, his anguish at her loss (and possible un-loss…*that’s called foreshadowing ha!* and no she’s no a zombie). I can see the place in my mind, I can see the small details, like the dust that hangs in the late afternoon sunlight that is meandering through the 12th floor windows. See that line? That’s the best I can do. Real writers could describe the sunlight as a flavor and make you totally understand. *sigh*

It makes me wish I had a ghost writer..I could be a famous author, if only I didn’t have to write the stories.