Note to Self...

It is said that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

It is also said that God is Love.

What else, then, do you need to know?

The answers to your endless questions exist in that one simple truth.

You are not the fear that occupies you

You are not the doubt that undoes you

You are not the selfish lies you speak

Nor the selfish acts you do

You are not the envy that you feel

You are not the shame of your failings

Nor the pride of your victories

So, you’ve written a book…

What does it mean to have written a book?

That’s the question I’m asking myself now, a week after finishing the first draft manuscript of my first novel.  I’m wondering what is it that I’ve done.

I’m supposed to feel really good, and I did, for nearly the entire day.

But that euphoria didn’t last, and coming down was like a caffeine crash.  It was, in fact, a caffeine crash, because immediately after finishing the book I swore off coffee and the like, at least for a month.  By the next day I was in a completely explicable funk, tired and cranky.  I was mentally exhausted, having written the last six chapters in the last two weeks of the year.  Around, under, over and through the holidays.  When I complained of this to Elizabeth, she told me I was just tired and needed to rest. 

But I knew there was more to it than that.  I had a new question to answer, and no suspects.

What does it mean to have written a book?

For the next week, I did no writing at all, and stayed away from the computer as much as possible.  I felt lost.  Withdrawal symptoms.  Following Stephen King’s advice, I decided to put aside the manuscript for a month, use the time to gain some distance and some clarity.  I started thinking about the next book, and also about the future role and function of thunderstrokes.  But the question loomed over me the entire time, still hangs over me, and so now I’m trying to sort it out, the only way I seem to be able to sort things out anymore, in writing. 

What does it mean to have written a book?

Where do you even start to answer that question?  Elizabeth tells me it’s a great accomplishment.  But in my mind, the answer comes back quick:  it’s only a first draft of a manuscript.  One massive revision is needed just to make coherent and readable enough to critique, and then at least another to make it publishable.  And that’s only if I perform magnificently.  From where I stand, it doesn’t feel like a book yet.

The sober, rational side of me looks at how I’ve spent my time and wonders what the hell I was ever thinking.  Two-and-a-half years spent finding my voice, finding a way forward, and then dreaming up this crazy story about a kid who has to go to a strange land and accomplish the Twelve Labors of Hercules, and then turning that dream into a rickety reality, held together, it mostly seems, with equal parts duct tape and pixie dust. Two-and-a-half years of lost income and retirement savings, of trying to dress up a dream in work-clothes, of feeling like a bystander while Elizabeth bears the entire financial load for our family, of struggling with fears and doubts and uncertainties about myself as a writer in an endless procession of constantly changing mutations, each one as ferocious and as deadly as any monster Hercules ever faced, or will. 

I know that sounds dramatic, but I believe it.  The harshest battles most of us will ever face is with ourselves.  Our inner monsters cannot be seen, and for that we should be grateful.  I sincerely believe that if they were given a tangible form, they would fill us with such terror and paralyzing fear it would put Hollywood’s horror-meisters and their paltry creations to shame.

So that, at least, is something. I have learned that I can live with the doubts and uncertainties, and find my way through.

80's Buddy Pictures

We here at thunderstrokes are big believers in the four R's: recycling, reducing, reusing, and repurposing.

As proof, today we are offering a collection of repurposed pictures featuring recycled celebrities, reusing a traditional comedic device known as inappropriate photo captioning, the results of which have been reduced in scale from monumentally hilarious to merely silly.

The following gallery of celebrity buddy photos all hail from the era of Reagan, Frogger, and Gilbert Gottfried, and were borrowed without permission from The Huffington Post, which really wasn't doing anything with them anyway.

So, here you go, a little feature we're calling...Celebr80's

#1:  Betty White and Charlie Sheen

Charlie (to himself):  Betty has no idea what she's in for tonight...
Betty (to herself):  The hell I don't.                                                    

Bullitt Slug Bug

Remember when you were a kid, and you used to play Slug Bug?  You’d be going somewhere in the family car, and you and your siblings or friends would be watching the road like hawks from the back seat.  As soon as you saw a Volkswagen Beetle, you’d lean back and WHAM! let your neighbor have it by punching them in the arm, shoulder, ribs, neck, or wherever you thought you could inflict the most damage (aside from the obvious).  In our family’s version of Slug Bug, if the person made a sound while being hit, you got to hit them again.  I don’t know how many times we’d start a game of Slug Bug, and some time later I would find myself waking up in the waiting room of the local hospital.  Man, little sisters can be vicious.

I don’t know why, but for some reason Slug Bug only worked when you were in a car.  Inside a car, belting someone for being the first to see a Beetle was fine; outside a car, it was considered assault and battery.  I think even the hospital workers understood this.  When they found out that I had been beaten unconscious in the back seat during a game of Slug Bug, they’d just nod knowingly and tear up the child abuse reporting form they were filling out.

Remember how prolific the VW Bug used to be?  Yet, despite the German zest for the, shall we say…autocratic, they were never considered the king of the road.  Despite their lineage, Beetles just weren’t big enough, intimidating enough, or all-around serious enough for that.  No, the Beetle was all about mob rule, but of a decidedly friendly sort.  As a kid, peering out the car window at a cluster of Beetles surrounding you was like being licked to death by a dog; that is, provided there was no one wailing on you mercilessly at the time. 

In 1977 Volkswagen stopped selling Beetles in the U.S., and I think the game of Slug Bug gradually went dormant as the vehicles that once swarmed America’s streets, parking lots, and highways slowly dwindled.  Or maybe I just grew out of it.  Hard to know for sure.

Of course, Volkswagen revived the Beetle in the late 90’s, and several years ago, my daughter introduced me to a game she learned from some of her school friends called Buggy Punch.  She patiently explained the rules in the car one day, after suddenly exclaiming “Buggy Punch!” and hitting me on the back of my head.  I listened as though it were all new to me, while simultaneously fighting off panic-filled flashbacks to my childhood.

Lola Versus

The two-line TV onscreen description summarized the film something like this:  a twenty-nine year-old woman gets dumped three weeks before her wedding and then struggles to find love and happiness.  I didn’t watch the film because of the blurb.  I watched because of the title. 

Now that I’ve watched, I’m depressed.     

Lola Versus happens to be the first two words from the title of one of my favorite all-time albums, Lola Versus Powerman and the Money-go-round, Part One, from my all-time favorite band, The Kinks.  I would call it an iconic album, but the fact that so few people seem aware of its importance (existence?) kind of argues against the useful definition of the term. 

My love for The Kinks is such that even the merest suggestion of something connected to them brings me running.  My loyalty to The Kinks means I sometimes end up enduring things I wouldn’t otherwise endure.

Remember the movie Club Paradise?  Of course you don’t; no one does.  It came out in 1986, and starred Robin Williams, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Jimmy Cliff, and, if you can believe it, Peter O’Toole.  In the commercials for the film, they used the Kinks’ song “Apeman,” also from the album Lola Versus Powerman etc., etc.  That was enough for me.  Elizabeth and I went to see it the summer we started dating.     

Club Paradise put me in a difficult spot.  For years afterward I defended the film, insisting that it was “okay,” or “so-so.”  But it wasn’t.  It was dreadful.  Only I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, because they had been kind enough to feature “Apeman” prominently in the film.  With my twisted sense of fealty, I felt like I owed Club Paradise something because they had publicly acknowledged the greatness of my favorite band.

Here's the trailer for Club Paradise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Ud2UJCv4s (go ahead; it's worth it just to see Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy dressed in their 80's dweebish best)

Twerking Hitler

You may have seen the secret photo session pictures released this week of Hitler shortly after his release from prison (Mein Kampf, anyone?) in 1925, according to this story in The Huffington Post.

After seeing the photos, I'm kind of relieved that he was using that time to perfect his Angry Aryan impersonation. I was really worried they'd turn out to be boudoir shots. 

At any rate, as I was scanning through the photos, I couldn't help thinking about how silly he looked in them, practicing these exaggerated, almost vaudevillian poses.  I blame Mel Brooks for my failure to be properly impressed; he pretty much single-handedly destroyed any chance for me of taking Adolf seriously.  Don't get me wrong; I completely understand what a dangerous, hate-mongering fascist he was, and how much power and appeal his ideas continue to have amongst the feeble-minded and helplessly fear-mad in our world.  It's just that after you've seen The Producers and laughed uncontrollably throughout "Springtime for Hitler," and watched Dick Shawn's character, LSD (Lorenzo St. DuBois, if you must), brilliantly deflate Der Fuhrer without even realizing it, there's only so much respect you can hope to muster for a man who insisted on wearing a toothbrush moustache.   

As I scrolled through the pictures, one after another I had these completely ridiculous and equally incongruous captions pop into my head, imagining the things Hitler might be saying or thinking.   

Critics may accuse me of beating a dead horse, but I know better.  This horse isn't dead, really; it's more like undead, and as the current popularity of zombies extensively illustrates, there are no limitations on the type or frequency of beatings that can be visited upon the undead...

In that spirit, then, I humbly offer the following:

"This twerking thing is harder than it looks..."

Love, If

For those of you out there seeking answers, may I suggest that there are answers, or rather, an answer.   

Love.

Jesus said it, Shakespeare set rhyme to it, Einstein deduced it, the Beatles sang it, Robert Indiana sculpted it, Dr. King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa fought for it; yet, despite these illustrious and accomplished proponents, each one of us must discover for ourselves that it is the truth, and the answer to everything.

Be advised, however, that knowing the answer is not the same as getting the answer, and knowing only marks your starting point on a new road, not an endpoint.   If you’re like me, what will happen next is that you will realize how perfectly terrible you are at it, and how far you actually are from your destination. 

It will probably shock you to know. 

On the other hand, if you’re like me, you’ll be thrilled to have found the road at all.

Anyway, here’s where I am now on that road, in exactly fourteen lines…

Meeting with The Boss, A Springsteen Odyssey - Song 4 (and a birthday card)

A Springsteen Odyssey is an ambitious effort to tell the story of one Springsteen concert, from one fan's perspective.  What makes it ambitious is that it is twenty-six parts long, one part for each song played by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band that night, with each song helping to tell one part of the story.  Taken as a whole, they provide a comprehensive picture of a fan's relationship to an artist and his music, but each part also stands completely on its own.  This is part 4 of 26.  You can read part 1 here.

Let’s see, where were we?

I believe we were on our way up at the end of song three.  A quick check of the previous post, and yes, that’s exactly where we were.

All of us in the audience, it seemed, had been caught up in the spontaneous, swelling exuberance of I’m a Rocker.  Coming as it did after a slow start, and a disappointing one for me, the relief I was feeling at that moment was indescribable.

Well, perhaps not completely indescribable.

I used to have an old pick-up truck with a clutch that was nearly worn out.  It became progressively harder to get going in the morning, and one day I couldn’t seem to get the truck into gear at all.  I was sitting there, the engine idling, gears spinning incoherently, mashing the stick into the flywheel over and over, and it seemed like no matter how many times I tried, it just wouldn’t catch.  I found myself suddenly wondering if this is it, if my old truck’s finally had it, and what will I do now.  But then the clutch somehow magically did engage.  I could feel the harness slipping once again over the flailing beast of a motor, futile energy channeled into useful power one more time.  I set off for work, sighing with relief, happier in that moment than I ever would have been had the darn truck been working perfectly all along.

It felt something like that. 

I’m guessing that Springsteen felt it too, knew that he had things moving in the right direction, and understood, with a veteran performer’s canniness, not to let the surge falter.  That might be why, while Max Weinberg was still busy splashing around on the cymbals during the song’s finale, The Boss began counting out “One..two..,” forcing Weinberg to rapidly alter direction in mid-splash.  Even so, he was able to pick up the count before Springsteen could get to ‘three,’ and belted out five big, staccato beats.  Then he held up momentarily, letting silence fill the next two counts, creating an instant, electric anticipation in the crowd, like the one that comes during a fireworks display, each time there’s that long, expectant moment of silence between the fizzle of the rocket’s fire-trail and the booming blossom of color in the sky. 

In this case, though, the pause was broken by a prancing piano jangle synchronized to the deep Bahm..Bahm, bah-bah-Bahm..Bahm, of the saxophone.  Recognition flashed through the arena, and the audience roared out in spontaneous reaction.    

Ray Harryhausen remembered

Let’s take a few moments to mark the passing of Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, who died on May 7^th at the age of 92.  Ray was best known for creating movie monsters.  Not the kind that could be played by a guy in a rubber suit with a face buried under twelve layers of spirit gum, but mythical, sometimes grotesque, sometimes majestic, largely nonhuman ones.  

To do this he created highly detailed miniature models, which he would pose and then photograph one frame at a time, twenty-four different times in order to produce one second of film.  If my math is correct (always a dicey proposition), a five-minute scene would require somewhere on the order of 7,200 separate ‘shots,’ with each shot usually requiring multiple minute adjustments to the model (or models). 

And somehow, the man lived to be 92.  He must have possessed the patience of Job, along with the gumption of a sea barnacle.

The resulting animation was then typically incorporated as seamlessly as possible into the live action of the film, so that it appeared that some gargantuan reptile or sea monster was sharing the screen with Jason and the Argonauts, or battling Sinbad and his crew, or conquering San Francisco, or stomping on Rome, or whatever the case may be. 

If you go back and look at his work, what becomes obvious is his attention to detail and stubborn commitment to producing the best results possible.  This wasn’t the kind of guy who was content to glue bits of latex to a lizard and call it a Dimetrodon. 

Emphatically not an example of Ray Harryhausen's skill

Yet, although I’ve always had great respect for Harryhausen’s work, I can’t say I’ve always been a huge fan of it.  I think that’s due to timing more than anything.  My first movie experience was Star Wars, and the problem with that is the film’s special effects were so spectacularly effective that it rendered the inherently unbelievable perfectly believable (at least to my nine-year-old mind).  Star Wars created an artificial reality so unhindered by the obvious presence of a magician’s hand that my imagination was completely immersed into it, and the resulting experience was absolutely thrilling.  Once that happened, once I had the realization that such a thing was even possible, well, there was no going back, no settling for less. 

And, unfortunately, Ray’s stop-motion animation, while it was performed at the highest possible level, could never quite clear that final barrier to believability.  His creations, as careful and nuanced and detailed as they were, always struck me as what might happen if Dr. Frankenstein, after his first giddy taste of success, went on a resurrection spree and brought an entire menagerie of prehistoric monsters and mythical beasts back to life.  Plodding, stone-footed cadences; each creature a staircase series of frozen motions, the perpetually nagging sense of knowing that you were watching an inanimate object imitating a living thing; those are the unfortunate constraints placed on Ray’s work. 

None of which was really his fault, though; he was simply bumping up against the ceiling of the technology that existed at the time.  To his tremendous credit, he pushed the process of stop-motion to its absolute limits, and extracted from it a certain kind of effectiveness which no one else could quite match as successfully. 

Besides, anyone with an understanding of the tedious, precise, unforgiving nature of the work involved in model animation (setting aside the vast array of additional problems introduced by blending animation with live action) has to admire what he was able to accomplish.  I acquired my keen sense of appreciation by making several stop-motion films as a kid.  With Rob, my friend and partner in crime, we learned two great lessons from these experiences.  One was that making stop-motion movies was easy; the second was that making stop-motion movies that weren’t hopelessly cheesy was next to impossible. 

Adventures of Hercules Mendoza: Tease #1

So, everybody who reads thunderstrokes knows that I’m working on a novel based on Greek mythology.  The Adventures of Hercules Mendoza is a reimagining of the classic story of Hercules and the Twelve Labors.   Except in this version, Hercules is a fourteen-year-old (almost fifteen) Mexican-American boy who lives in the rather nondescript Southern California town of El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego.  His father has recently remarried, some three years after the death of Les’ mother (by the way, he prefers that you call him Les and not Hercules; you’ll understand why when you meet him), and the arrival of this strange new woman changes everything for the worse.  His father seems different, and their relationship is growing more difficult and confrontational day by day.  Furthermore, Les is convinced that this new woman does not like him, even though she pretends artfully enough whenever his father is around.  He has the distinct feeling that she would prefer he were somewhere – anywhere – else.  Naturally, he can’t stand her. 

El Cajon, if you don’t mind me deviating briefly, is Spanish for ‘the box.’ If you’ve ever been in El Cajon (perhaps passing through on the way to San Diego, like most of us half-baked Arizonans), you may have noticed that the town is hemmed in by hills and mountains on three sides, thus the name El Cajon.  However, the idea of boxes, and being boxed in, and how to break out of the boxes we occasionally find ourselves in, or put ourselves in, happens to be a central theme in the novel.  Purely serendipitous choice of location, as it turns out.    

By now you may be beginning to wonder where the Greek mythology comes in, as the story seems to concern itself primarily with the adolescent angst of young Les Mendoza.  Well, hang on now; don’t get your chiton in a twist.  Even though the story is set in contemporary, post-9/11 America, Greek mythology does play a powerful role in the book, exerting an undeterred influence on everything that happens to our pobrecito protagonist.  As if he didn’t have enough worries to keep him going, Les finds himself transported one day to a bizarre and barren realm, where he subsequently learns he has been given the opportunity (read:  he has no choice at all in the matter) to attempt the same daunting feats once accomplished by the great Greek hero himself.   

If only Les had been paying attention to all those stories about heroic Hercules that his aunt Lucinda liked to tell, and that he despised so much.

Well, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?