Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard

Let Me Give You Some Advice

2009-11-08T23:32:00.003-06:00

Have you ever noticed that, in fiction or in movies, a character giving advice usually isn't listened to? If some weird dude says, "Don't go down that road and turn left into that foggy field or else a demon will rip your eyes out," then of course the other character laughs off this advice (or warning--I guess a warning is just advice with an implied threat of calamity weighing it down) and goes down the road anyway, or in spite of the advice, and gets their damn eyes ripped out. You could actually say that advice in a fictional realm is almost like a backhanded kind of prodding, a way of showing the main character's chutzpa, and the closer to a rouge cop the character is, the more likely they'll really not listen to advice. And usually it's pretty good advice, in the main character's best interest. It's the sort of advice that if you didn't listen to, in real life, you'd probably would be fucked right quick (and there'd be no wacky vindication down the road, either).

Sometimes, to combat this, writers will have the main character listen to the advice and act on the advice, but this is almost always because the advice comes from a ROGUE AGENT. I personally dislike backstabbing characters as a narrative device, not only because they disagree with my sense of fair play in the war of Good versus Evil but because they seem to be a rather easy narrative device. For example, that one traitor dude at the end of the second Matrix movie. WTF?!? Also, as soon as I realized that the new Battlestar Galactica series would turn on the screw of "Who can you trust? Cylons are everywhere!" I just stopped watching. Because fuck it. I don't feel like playing guess who for fifty hours.

Your thoughts on advice? Do you listen to it or ignore it? I, of course, ignore any advice that is good for me, because I invariably do everything the hard way, and I'm practically fictional in my own right.

My Agent is Awesome

2009-11-05T11:03:00.002-06:00

My agent, Jonathan Lyons of Lyons Literary LLC, is a good guy. We've been together since, uh, 2004? Originally Jonathan represented a novel I wrote titled Knocking Over the Fishbowl, but after a full two rounds of rejections (by rounds I mean it went on so long new editors appeared and were submitted to at the same publishing house) we had to let go of Fishbowl (a comedic literary novel I still really like) and move on with The Suicide Collectors. And that only sold after a year of submissions.

Agents typically make 15% of what you make, and since I've made barely anything so far, Jonathan has somehow subsisted on 15% of almost nothing. I suppose he views me as a long, long, long term investment, and I truly hope I pay off for him. I'm just glad he has a full and lucrative client base to draw on and let's me along for the ride. I think the secret is to find an agent when they're young and still full of hope, just like you are as a writer, and only bother them when it's ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

Here's a recent seven question interview Jonathan did for Writing Raw (note: it is a pdf file).

Attack of the Killer Pumpkin!

2009-10-29T11:41:00.004-05:00

Last Sunday I carved a pumpkin at a pumpkin carving party. This morning, I awoke to find that it had sunken inward so much that I wondered briefly if the cat had jumped on it repeatedly, like Garfield in a comic strip. Peering into it's enormous cyclopsian eye, I noted a dark, thick woolly fungus lining its entire interior. And a smell, oh, what a smell! So it was obviously time to get rid of it.

But the killer pumpkin had other ideas.

It came apart at my touch, so I just couldn't pick it up and toss it. So I got a plastic bag and tried to fold it into that, now dizzy with killer pumpkin mold, and the damn thing broke apart further and released a special watery gross liquid that dropped me to my knees. Keeling over, I managed to reach for a second plastic bag and scoop the remaining pumpkin guts into that, folding the whole mess into a giant toxic burrito. Mustering every last ounce of resolve I had (which wasn't much, because I hadn't had any caffeine yet) I managed to stagger outside with the pumpkin corpse in my arms and heave it into the dumpster out back as chilling rain poured upon my head.

Rest in peace, carved pumpkin, and haunt this place no more!

Halfway There

2009-10-27T11:34:00.002-05:00

I reached the halfway point of the first draft in my novel-in-progress last night. I know it's the halfway point because I've written a bare bones outline (see Plotting Your Novel! below) and, at the moment, there's forty chapters plotted and I just finished Chapter 20. Also, it's at page 150, and that's a good round halfway point.

I don't know if it's like this for all writers, but for me, the number aspect of writing a book always looms large. It shouldn't, but it does. I try to write at least 1,200 words a day covering about 5 pages. If you were to do this every day, in exactly 60 days you'd have yourself a 300 page rough draft. Of course, it doesn't work out so easily and there are several days lost to weekends and periods of time when the book isn't developed enough in my mind to go forward, and I have to sort of mull it over by playing video games, going on walks, and just generally not thinking too hard about the book. I also have to take breaks in the current novel to go back and edit the one before it as it goes through various stages of production.

I'm well aware that mere numbers and word output doesn't exactly make a great book, but I guess I use numbers to keep myself motivated (as if starvation weren't motivator enough) and to track the novel's progress as I go along.

Heart-Shaped Box

2009-10-23T15:26:00.002-05:00

I'm reading Heart-Shaped Box right now. It's by Joe Hill, the writerly chip of the old block of Stephen King. I've read almost everything King's written, consider myself a fan with reservations, and it makes for a surreal experience to read a book by his son in the same horror genre King works in. It's a good read, very quickly paced, but I'm having trouble giving a crap about the main character as he fights for his life. I'm only halfway through, so maybe I'll be won over by the end, but he feels like your standard, aging, jaded rock singer with a ready made "dark" background attached (his father didn't like him playing the rock-n-roll!). As I'm whisked along the fast paced plot, with the characters' back stories sort of wedged in along the way, I can't help but feel like no matter what happens I won't be surprised, and not in a Greek tragedy way, either. More like an okay, sure, kind of way. Also, for those of you who have already read both, I can't help but feel like I'm having Thinner flashbacks as I go along. I hope I never piss off anyone enough to make them put a curse on me/send a ghost to haunt me.

But it is spooky, and nicely fucked up in places, and a good diversion as the snow falls here in St. Paul, a full week before Halloween.

Plotting Your Book

2009-10-20T11:24:00.002-05:00

Hello, there! Would you like advice on plotting your book? Awesome! We here at Blogagaard, Inc. are here to help!

The first thing you have to decide is whether you'd like to sell out or write a book that's unique and actually interests you. This is not a choice to be made lightly! If you sell out, you can use a generic plot slapped together from other books in the genre you choose to write in. The only important thing, besides opening a "savings" account, is coming up with a good hook to sell the book and a really snappy title. And then POOF! You've made some money.

But if you'd rather write in your "voice" (God help you) be prepared for a wild, roller coaster ride through a Tunnel of Agony. Expect people not to "get it" because your book is "different" than other books, but THAT IS OKAY! You can always sell out with the next book!

Now, on the subject of plotting. I would suggest you have a compelling first chapter, starting with a compelling first sentence, and then a compelling second sentence, etc. Are you still with me? GREAT! But now you're asking, what about the second chapter and so on? Well, that's simple. Keep writing compelling sentences! And try to create what is called a DRAMATIC NARRATIVE ARC, which is basically a line that keeps rising with tension and intrigue until it reaches a narrative CLIMAX, and then trails off a little while everything is wrapped up.

I know a lot of writers do extensive plotting of their novels, using flow charts and spreadsheets and note cards, but try it the Oppegaard way: write a one sentence outline of each chapter after you're about twenty pages into the book while drinking whatever beverage inspires your creative mind (tequila works for me, for some reason). And then, as you go along, consult this outline and rewrite it and reshuffle it until it looks like you've gone insane. And then, KAZAAM!

You've plotted a book!

The Librarians Walk Among Us!

2009-10-15T17:10:00.003-05:00

This morning I drove out to St. Cloud, MN to speak on a horror genre panel with author (and editor at Skullvines Press) S.D. Hintz at the MN Librarians Association conference. The event took place in the St. Cloud Civic Center and was surprisingly noisy for a building packed with librarians. The civic center there is also the home of the Minnesota Baseball Hall of Fame which, God willing, Joe Mauer may sneak into someday now that he's earned his third batting title while still in his mid-twenties. There were a lot of cool Twins memorabilia items in glass cases, an enormous Louisville slugger with Kent Hrbek's name on it, and a lot of pictures of local baseball legends from places like New Ulm, Rochester, etc.

Our panel, which was actually split up by a St. Paul librarian named Jennifer giving a great 9,000 word presentation on the horror genre and then S.D. and I answering questions/talking about horror from our angle, was packed and went well. Jennifer talked about a sub-genre called splatterpunk which I hadn't known even existed, but it does, with really graphic violence and sex and seems to be aimed at making the reader uneasy, with Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite standing out as two such authors. We also talked about why readers like to read horror in the first place (it's a catharsis, it makes your own non-being-chased-by-evil life seem better, you really get behind your protagonist, etc.) Here's some horror titles Jennifer recommended in case you're looking for a freaky Halloween read this fall:

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
Books of Blood (1-3) by Clive Barker (1984)
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton (2006)
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)
The Wolfman by Nicholas Pekearo (2008)
Naked Brunch by Sparkle Hayter (2003)
The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell (2005)

Crazy Things

2009-10-12T11:59:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I was watching football with my lady friend when I heard a loud thump/crash just one level below an explosion. I head toward the bathroom, in the general direction of the noise, wondering what my cat could possibly have done to make such a loud noise. He's sitting on his bathmat, spooked but apparently innocent. More noise came from outside, so I peer out the high bathroom window. A cherry red classic car has crashed into my apartment building and is desperately spinning its tires in an attempt to back up the hill that separates the parking lot and the building.

It never made it on its own, and had to get pulled out via chain by the same guy who lives in the apartment below mine. The car (a Packer, maybe?) actually smashed into the window frame, jarring it loose, and a little more momentum and that basement apartment might of had a classic car in its own grill. This is exactly the crazy kind of shit that happens in real life that you'd get yelled at for putting in a book as "not believable".

I still don't know how the accident happened, though I heard the guy say something about the car was stuck in neutral, or something. He actually doesn't even live in our building, his garage is in the alley across from ours. I do know he wasn't having the greatest Sunday afternoon.

Hooks

2009-10-09T13:42:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking lately (oh no) that plotting a book is a lot like commercial fishing. You head out into these freezing, dangerous seas, cast your net, and hope you make a good haul before you capsize and everyone drowns. You need to cast your plotting net deep enough (by weighing it down with heavy characters living heavy lives) but you don't want to drop it so low you scrape the ocean floor and get it tangled up in the murk and lose the whole thing. Also, a crucial thing about a good commercial fishing net/plot is that it has a lot of hooks in it. Hooks in the sense that each chapter, and practically each sentence, has the reader interested in what happens next. I haven't read Dan Brown, but I'm guessing his books are filled with hooks (probably really blatant ones anybody can get snagged by) and that's what makes reading his stuff so "page turning". When you read work by apprentice writers, you often get bogged down in description and dialogue, and suddenly you're wondering "Why do I care about any of this?" and that's when they lose you, that's when you close the book and wander off to watch TV.

I suppose the mark of an excellent writer is not only do they keep you reading with well placed hooks, encouraging you to stay with the story and even lose yourself in the story, they do it with hooks that are so subtle you don't even know you've been caught until its too late to swim away.

Chekhov is A Friend Of Mine

2009-10-07T20:50:00.004-05:00

I finished reading a 450 page collection of Anton Chekhov's short stories today, translated by the big time famous Russian translators Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky, who were made instantly wealthy by Oprah when she picked Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy for her book club.

Chekhov wrote a lot of stories about a lot of people from all walks of life. His plotting is pretty straight forward (if you guess the main character's going to die sooner or later, you're usually right) and he's brilliant at building a very visual, living atmosphere for his characters to exist in. And while Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, his Russian author predecessors, were big on moralizing in an obvious way and philosophically smacking the reader around, his touch is much gentler, almost ambiguous, and much of the fun of reading one of his stories is trying to pick out what he believes and what he doesn't believe. Critics of his time scolded him for not taking a more concrete stance (a.k.a. drugs are bad! Don't cheat on your husband!) I think it's one of the main reasons his work holds up so well today. He really helped bring along a modern form of story telling, the written short story, into the modern(ish) era.

Be careful, though. If you're not paying attention, some little story of his will wring your heart. He is Russian, after all.

Mystery and Science! With Robots!

2009-10-05T14:12:00.004-05:00

I've been watching old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, courtesy of the fine St. Paul library system. If you've never seen this show, it was a local, low budget program that featured a guy and his talking, wise cracking robot friends. The premise was that they'd all been banished to a space satellite called the Satellite of Love, where they were doomed to exist in a sort of "No Exit" way and watch bad, bad movies. So each episode of the show is basically you watching them watch movies, with breaks for a little live action. A very similar model to Beavis and Butthead, now that I think about it, except, of course, Beavis and Butthead watched bad music videos.

And I have to tell you, the show still holds up today. The references are still fittingly obscure and if you get most of them you have to feel you're doing alright for yourself. I can't imagine I got most of the references back in the day, so I must have been happy simply watching robots make fun of a movie. The show's writers possessed the ability of turning otherwise dull movies into a sort of hypnotic experience in which you are both engaged and not. Of course, a few drinks doesn't hurt your viewing experience, either.

Reviews: Put on Earth to Torture Artists?

2009-10-02T11:32:00.002-05:00

A few years ago the author Frederick Busch came to town and, through Hamline, I was lucky enough to publicly interview him about his work. While the interview went well, I thought the best part of the whole was just having dinner with him beforehand. He told me, a novice at the time hoping to be published someday, to not believe the good reviews because then I'd have to believe the bad.

But that's hard, isn't it? You work on a book for years, mostly in the dark, and then you're not supposed to care what "professional critics" think about it? When the first reviews of The Suicide Collectors came out, I read each review greedily. And the reviews were actually pretty great, but it was always that one bad review I'd find myself obsessing over, knowing I shouldn't take it personally but still doing so anyway.

Now it's been a year since my first reviews and my second novel is approaching, hopefully to be reviewed many times over itself. I've developed a bit of a glaze when I read reviews now, and the effect seems to be that good reviews are dampened so they don't really affect me much at all, and the bad (or middling) reviews are half-dampened. So I'm half-tortured, basically. Which is strange. You can tell yourself the critic just didn't get what you were going for (and they seem to have trouble with my endings) but you find yourself doubting yourself anyway, because of course you're not the most subjective viewer of your work.

Which can be totally poisonous and heinous. The writer plays God in each novel, and if God doesn't know what the hell is going on, no one does. So Busch was right: feel free to read your own reviews at your own risk. You don't know if that reviewer is a frustrated novelist themselves, or had a bad day when they wrote that review, of if they're dead on. And it doesn't matter. The best you can do is write the story as it seems to fall to you, creating a world and story (including the ending) that seems so inevitable nothing else even registers as a possibility.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger

2009-10-01T20:27:00.002-05:00

With the help of my friend Kelly, we now have a great new look for Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard. Not only that, but I plan to blog much more frequently now and talk about writing more, etc., in anticipation of Wormwood, Nevada's release in little over two months.

I've been blogging on this very site since 2005 and this is only the third template change for the blog. Hopefully it will attract nothing but scintillating conversation; please think of Deep Thoughts as 2009's answer to the 1920's Paris...

Also in the works is a new look for my author website, so stay tuned, people!

First Wormwood, Nevada Review

2009-09-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

From Booklist:

Wormwood, Nevada.

Oppegaard, David (Author)

Dec 2009. 256 p. St. Martin's, hardcover, $24.99. (9780312381110).

Within hours of their arrival in sun-blasted, hardscrabble Wormwood, Nevada, Tyler and Anna Mayfield watch a meteorite crash into the parking lot of the Taco Thunder Mexican restaurant. It’s a dramatic introduction to their new hometown, and as the community bakes under a sun as fierce as “the angry eye of God,” some of the natives begin to reveal themselves as deeply dotty. One mounts a chaise lounge next to the crater to await the End. Tyler is invited to join the Visitation Society, which plans to welcome wise aliens who will teach earthlings about peace and happiness and mediate their arrival with nervous Russian and Chinese militarists. And everyone tries to cope with loneliness and the need to believe in something.

For Oppegaard, less seems to be more. His style is matter-of-fact, even when Tyler has a one-sided conversation with an alien, and he only hints at the nature of the angst troubling the citizens of Wormwood. Even so, readers who take the genre-bending journey to Wormwood will be glad they did.

— Thomas Gaughan

Paperback Cover Image of The Suicide Collectors

2009-09-07T20:58:00.001-05:00

My Latest Temp Venture

2009-09-06T23:06:00.002-05:00

Ah, the sweet world of temp work! Every time I think I'm out, you pull me back in, Sweet Lady of Cheap Disposable Labor!

My latest Adecco temp venture is a two week stint at the U of M bookstore in Minneapolis. It's the start of the academic school year (tomorrow) and the students are back on campus, snapping up binders, paper, and spiral notebooks at sale prices. That's where I come in: someone has to haul and stock all the back to school stuff from the storeroom to the floor and make sure all the supplies are well-stocked. So I and a large crew of other temps, store employees, and student workers spend eight hours a day circling a six hundred square foot section of the store, trying to avoid crashing into each other while keeping ourselves busy. Some highlights so far include the temp worker who told me within 5 minutes that he was currently living in his car, the evil blisters on my feet, and the endless valley girl conversations/reunions that I'm forced to overhear daily. Oh my god, I had SUCH A GREAT SUMMER YOU GUYS!

So there you have it, a glorious update on the glamorous life of a writer. Boo fuckin ya!

Pics from Glacier

2009-09-02T23:42:00.010-05:00

Headed to Glacier

2009-08-21T14:43:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow we here at Blogagaard Inc. will be leaving for a road trip to north western Montana, to Glacier National Park, to see mountains and walk among bears. If you've never been to Glacier, it's about a 20 hour drive away and really one of THE prettiest places on the planet. You can bop along on Going to the Sun Road and actually feel as if you're about to drive above the earth, above the clouds, and into outer space itself. Just beautiful.

We'll catch you on the flip side of a week.

Peace!

The Final Day of My Twenties

2009-08-18T12:50:00.002-05:00

Well, today is my final day as a twenty-something, as I turn 30 tomorrow. I didn't expect to feel sentimental about turning thirty, but over the past few weeks I have been taking stock, with a focus on my twenties. Let's review, shall we...(you might want to get a snack before reading the rest of this post)

I turned 20 the summer before my sophomore year at St. Olaf. I've written two novels.

I turned 21 in St. Petersburg, Russia. I fell asleep during a performance by the legendary Petersburg ballet. Two months later, my mother died, casting a deep shadow over my junior year and all subsequent years.

One month after I turned 22, Sept. 11th occurred. I wrote my third, and generally worst, novel in this year, half of which I spent abroad in England, the Caribbean, and mainland Europe. I graduated from St. Olaf College and entered the cold, cruel world of temp. employment.

I spent my 23rd year working full-time at River Lake Eye Clinic. This would begin a vicious, soul destroying five year period of working as an optician. I also began work on my fourth novel, Knocking Over the Fishbowl.

I started grad school at Hamline University for writing shortly after turning 24. Yay! My soul is revived. Work on Fishbowl continues. Good grad school friends are made.

A few weeks after turning 25, I form an alliance with Jonathan Lyons, Literary Agent to the Stars. We will now spend about two years shopping Fishbowl around New York without success. Still, a joyous year. I begin work on The Suicide Collectors.

26 is foggy. The Suicide Collectors nears completion. I graduate from Hamline with an MFA in Writing. I quit my job in the spring, travel around England, France, and Ireland.

27. Return to the eye clinic for one more horrible year. Meet a girl, decide to move to Boise with her. Two weeks before we leave, I find out St. Martin's Press wants to publish The Suicide Collectors.

28. The Lost Year. Spent almost entirely in Boise, Idaho, pounding out the 700 pages that will become Wormwood, Nevada.

29. Return from Boise to St. Paul. Write 8th novel, From the Void. In December The Suicide Collectors is published to good reviews and a horrible economy. Work at the U of MN history department as a temp for six months. When assignment ends, enjoy vagabond summer, meet new girl (from same history dept). Begin work on 9th novel, The Floating Luminosity.

There. That about sums it up.

Trapped...at SuperTarget!

2009-08-11T18:45:00.004-05:00

The other night I was shopping at the Midway Super Target with Melissa, my new lady friend. We're almost ready to check out when they announce over the speakers that there's been a severe storm warning and that everyone has to stop shopping and head to the back of the store to an area called Seasonal. You can leave Target if you want, fool that you are, but you cannot buy any of your items. Ha ha ha!

At first this seems like some kind of joke, yet suddenly everyone's wheeling their stuffed carts back to seasonal and Target Team Members are collecting in the back of the store, too. Those bright red shirts they wear seem okay in small doses, but when you get like twenty or thirty of those shirts together it does something funny to your eyes and you can't really look at them too long. So of course this warning lasts a long time and people are getting weird and twice, yes, twice, I wander back near a front aisle to try and find a small container of minced garlic and twice I'm caught and yelled at by a Target Team Member. Except, it's not really like yelling because they always began with, "Did you hear the announcement about the storm?" like maybe I'm just some kindly old lady with bad hearing or something. Meanwhile, Melissa's pointing out how ridiculously trite the items we've selected for purchase through (mostly) impulse and how we could just leave the cart we've spent an hour filling up and yet again I have an urge to go find garlic, Ahab-like in my quest to outsmart Target team members.

Finally, to the relief of all, the announcement dude screeches that the warning's been lifted and we can all go to the front of the store again and check out. The red shirted, khaki pantsed team members run up to the front of the store to check everybody out and then we've made it, we've really made it, out into the goddamn muggiest night ever. And true to form, we also stop at Big Top Liquor on our way back to my apartment. There we regale the clerk with our tale and he stares at us in disbelief. Big Top Liquor is no place to go to be protected from yourself.

Invasion: Earth

2009-08-09T17:27:00.003-05:00

So, I recently finished watching Invasion: Earth a BBC miniseries from 1998 about, you guessed it, the invasion of Earth. Basically, without boring you with small details that I couldn't understand even when I was cold sober, a lonely part of Scotland (and which part isn't?) has become the focal point for the invasion of Earth, because, let's face it, that's as exotic a filming locale as you're going to get for a low budget BBC miniseries.

So there's these friendly aliens, fighting the bad aliens, and their conflict lands on Earth. The friendly aliens soon lose, though, and now Earth is in the crossfire. The bad aliens, who actually exist in the 4th dimension, are going to suck the life out of earth. That is, if bad acting doesn't suck the life out of the viewer first. There's a bunch of characters, with strange accents that might be British or Scottish or Irish or Welsh. My favorite though has to be the American. The American is a high ranking dude sent by NATO to oversee the landing of the alien spacecraft. You're never told the American is American, but he sure sounds like a poor man's Clint Eastwood and acts like a bold asshole American, though in the end his true grit kind of saves the day and he makes all the tough decisions after much hand wringing and shouting. Honestly, I wonder if the director told the cast before every shot that they needed to BE DRAMATIC PEOPLE, JUST BE DRAMATIC.

To make an incoherent review short, let's just say Invasion: Earth is mostly about people yelling at each other about aliens and if they may or may not be about to fuck Earth up with some cheap special effects thrown in, Dr. Who style, the most notable effect being an enormous gray purple black mountain thing that appears outside of town and starts swallowing everything around it, like the Blob, or Dick Cheney's soul.

Uptown Love: A True Story About a Harrowing Night at the VFW

2009-07-31T11:30:00.002-05:00

Last night Ben and I went to the VFW in Uptown. Not as glamorous as the W Minneapolis, but there you have it: we are temp workers and no captains of industry. This evening karaoke is on the docket and the crowd is rowdy, a Friday hipster war veteran crowd, and we’re lucky to snatch a booth because this means that as the bar gets more and more packed two tired girls who just want to sit down, at any cost, will eventually ask to join us in the booth. And when this happens the four of us proceed to get drunk on cheap pitchers of domestic beer and the later it gets the more beautiful everyone becomes and the better the karaoke singers sound and when someone near the front of the VFW begins crooning “Sweet Caroline” (a karaoke staple as inevitable as death) I find myself up on my feet and propelled across the room toward the popcorn machine.

On my way to the popcorn I notice an enormous man, a 400-pound man, sitting at a table with his girlfriend. My drunken heart is suddenly filled with love for this enormous rounded man, who may or may not be of Pacific Islander descent, and I drop into the empty chair beside him and say hello. We nod back and forth for a few minutes, all speech rendered inaudible by the screaming karaoke crowd, and when the song ends I challenge the Islander to a friendly arm wrestling match. This is a thing I do, an obnoxious drunk guy thing, and to my delight he accepts the challenge. Using valuable insights from the Sylvester Stallone movie Over the Top I somehow defeat the Islander and, myself incredulous that I’ve just beaten a man twice my size, look to my booth for confirmation that this event has been witnessed. Of course, Ben has eyes only for the girls and even as I shout for his attention I know it is hopeless, that I’ve just done the impossible and no one will ever believe me. The Islander’s girlfriend is laughing at my victory and when I ask the Islander if he’d like to wrestle a second time he leans toward me, very slowly, and informs me that he has a knife. I ask him if he means that in a metaphorical way and he just stares at me and that’s when I decide to head back to the booth. The girls ask me where is the damn popcorn and I tell them to look deep, the popcorn is in their souls.

Later, when we’ve all been whisked out of the VFW and we’re waiting with the girls while they wait for their cab, Ben and one of the girls start hugging about ten yards distant. It’s a sweet hug, as if they are two children in love. I make small talk with the second girl, who looks bored and does not seem on the verge of hugging anything. She tells me that she and her friend both work at a local pizza joint. When the taxi finally comes Ben and the girl break apart as the cab’s headlights fall upon them. Ben says something about not getting the girl’s phone number and I shout don’t worry, man, they work at Sally’s Pizza and Ben’s girl wheels and screams at her friend, YOU TOLD HIM WHERE WE WORK?

Yes, sir. That’s Uptown love for you.

My First Stab at Journalism

2009-07-17T11:16:00.004-05:00

I've written an essay about my trip to Burbank, CA for the Stoker Weekend and it's been posted here. I went into the process of writing it thinking writing is writing, but there are some crucial differences in the essay form, the biggest seeming to be the imperative of writing short, punchy sentences that the casual reader can pick up easily while scanning an article. I'm glad all the blog posts I've generated since 2005 are finally paying off!

And thanks to mnartists.org for giving me a chance!

Summer Dreamin'

2009-07-08T18:39:00.004-05:00

I just fell asleep by an open window on this lovely sunny July evening in my recliner. I could hear leaves rustling in the wind and the sound of a radio playing far away and street traffic even farther away and maybe you laughing at something funny someone just said. I dreamed of many things including my mother, who's now been dead nearly nine years and who herself was a champion afternoon napper. She was showing me a certificate signed and sealed that said I'd inherited an antique piece of sports memorabilia, a banner from the Brooklyn Dodgers, and as I slowly woke up from my summer dream I swear I could hear Wilco playing in the distance and for a second the world was at peace.

Blogagaard Finally Figures Out the Digital TV

2009-07-06T16:42:00.004-05:00

Change does not come easily to us here at Blogagaard, and so it should be no surprise that the digital TV transfer was a pain in the ass we bemoaned for around six months. Yet we are happy to report that today, on July 6th, 2009, we finally figured out why we weren't getting channels such as ABC, NBC, and FOX, all of which of course play a major role in watching sports. All this time we thought maybe it was our "super" antenna that sucked, and were considering a new one, until we heard Dick Bremer on a Twins broadcast mention something about "rescanning", and though it was doubtful he even knew what he was talking about we tried rescanning all the digital channels and now, thankfully, the stupid TV works and I can continue to ignore its offering knowing full well the free range of bad shows are now once again available to me.

The clear reception is nice, though.