Excerpt Time

Except from "Dreams in Ebony"

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“A quote from some woman named Lewis Carroll.”

“Lewis Carroll? Lewis was a man.”

“Oh no. I’m pretty sure she was a woman.”

“Alicia, believe me, he was a man. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was his real name.”

“Well, she looks like a woman in her picture.”

“Don’t you have anything more important to do? I’m trying to work.”

“It’s raining out and I’m dreadfully bored.”

“Dreadfully? I never thought I would say this but I think you read too much.”

Alicia sneered. “If you don’t know where you’re going… I don’t think any of us really know where we are going. Do you know where you’re going?”

I looked up from my work. “To hell,” I wanted to say but I didn’t. “Is something bothering you, Allie?”

“No way! I’m just thinking about what you’re gonna do when I’m gone.”

I tossed my pen down and took a drink. “Okay. So, where is it you’re going? And why are you leaving?”

She didn’t answer right away; she just dug at the crotch of her jean shorts, involuntarily swaying her foot back and forth. Finally, she said, “I don’t think I can just explain it to you that easy. I don’t think you would believe me if I did.”

“I want to believe you,” I said. I really meant it too. While Alicia could be frustrating at times, her mind fascinated me and if she was willing to open up and show me what was going on up there I wouldn’t argue.

“I have been dreaming about death.”

“What about it?”

“About ‘me’ dying.”

“You’re twenty three. If anyone around here needs to worry about dying it’s me.”

She got to her feet and walked to the window. “I really, really like fall time. So, pretty. I like leaves but they don’t live very long, do they? They’re dying and falling from the trees. I wonder if the tree is sad when its leaves die. I would be if I were a tree. It must be sad being a tree.”

“Are you sick or something?”

“No. Not yet.”

NANOWRIMO

Nanowrimo starts tonight (or tomorrow for people in other parts of the world). I decided this would be a good time to actually finish something I started and so I am going to write a novel: Dreams in Ebony.

Here's a bunch of philosophical garbage concerning this impending work:

In the case of Dreams in Ebony there are many unbelievable characters who engage in some rash and unbelievable acts and therefore, like fantasy, the author must work harder to legitimize the characters and their actions or risk losing the reader or worse: misguide the reader down a path the author did not want the story to go. This is, as stated before, not fantasy, not erotica, not a dime store romance, but rather a dark drama of sexual deviants. And despite the dark nature it is imperative that the end result of the work bring the reader to a good place where this chaotic world somehow settles into something more palatable; or at the very least, a return to normalcy, a cool breeze that hits the face of the movie goer as he steps out of the theatre.

Furthermore, or perhaps, deeper down the rabbit hole, a writer is bound by the oath of morality to create a positive message, regardless of how antipodal that message may be, for his reader due to the inherent dangers of parables woven into all stories and their ability to effect the moral compass in the subconscious mind of the masses. Think of the effects of violence in television or the rise of sexual promiscuity, a product of the expanding porn industry thanks to the Internet. These things are excellent examples of writer’s oath (or the oath of any artist) ignored. Gun don’t kill people, people don’t kill people, the media, the writer, the artist, the musician, the photographer, they kill people.

-D. Gage

Remember When? A Manifesto of Sorts.

What is important in life? Is it material gain? Is it friends and family? Is it hard work with a good harvest? When it’s all said and done, when you’re dying of whatever disease or ailment that fate should curse you with, when you have nothing left but a few moments to look back and ask yourself “was it all worth it” or “did I do my best”, will you have regrets? Isn’t there a girl you didn’t kiss but should have, a hamburger you wanted to eat but didn’t, a trip you could’ve taken but you were too afraid to leave home?

I have always believed that having experiences is the purpose of life, the “remember whens”, the funny anecdotes, the pain and pleasure, the friends and enemies. If I pursue this mode of thinking, if I focus on experience alone with no regards to sowing and reaping; and if I one day find myself alone and homeless, sleeping under a bridge, hacking out my lungs and lighting another cigarette, it will have all been worth it to have been part of the experience of life. I will have my memories. As muddled and vague as they are or will be, I will have those memories and that’s more than I can say for someone too afraid to live.

I remember back in the mid-nineties when I was high on magic mushrooms, lost in an airport parking lot in the dead of winter. I remember working for a printing press in Tyler, Texas, helping to produce tracks for YWAM, and witnessing to sinners on the streets of downtown Dallas. Once I lived in a tiny, cockroach-infested apartment in Reynosa, Mexico and I hiked through the boreal forests, muskegs and wild lands of Alaska when I was a boy. I was friends with Pastor’s sons and drug dealers, harlots and saints, geniuses and morons, shallow jerks and deep philosophers, hopeless poets. In the seventh grade I spent an entire semester playing chess and an entire summer getting drunk and stoned.  I have been a painter, a musician, a film maker and a dishwasher at a resort sixty miles out of town. I have been in love, found a soul mate and lost her, found her again and lost her again. I have been married and I have watched the horrors of chemotherapy tear apart the woman I love. I have been deep under the ocean in a warship and jammed in the back of a bush plane in inclement weather bound for Russia. I have seen the crumbling of communism first hand and the poverty of our Mexican neighbors. I have been a prince and a pauper, a god and the most mortal of men.

It’s these memories that keep me alive. It’s these stories that help me get up in the morning. I want to never have regrets. I’m sure I will. However, I can’t help but try my best, to make the decisions good or bad, regardless of the outcome and to be willing to live with the consequences. I only have one life to live, if Western theology is true, and I owe it to myself to live it as best as I know how.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not condemning hard work or success but I am saying that you can’t take it with you and I’m sure you don’t need a PhD to get into heaven nor will it keep you out of that other place. However, your experience, the love and loss, pain and pleasure, is more immortal than your fancy cars and I-phones, your degrees or even other people’s opinion of you. All you really own is your soul and your conscious self. Feed it with experience. 

 

-D. Gage (alias Nosmo King) 

image from: http://planetsave.com/2012/01/05/the-green-life/