Friday, August 12, 2005
Pants on Fire: Obfuscation 2005
Here’s the thing: before I was blogging, I was effectively writing posts in the comments boxes of a few select sites. There were only a few of them, and I’ve stopped visiting all but one. That one’s pea‘s site. pea and I got to be good friends, even though we have never met in person. But over three or so years of corresponding, IM’ing, phone conversations and occasional birthday gifts, I’ve come to consider pea one of my very closest friends, and her site, a home away from home. She and I have marvelled more than once at how such a medium as this could support the friendship we’ve grown, but there’s no question in my mind that she knows me better than a lot of people who have met me personally.
A couple of years ago she put together a little game called Obfuscations. The point was to see if people could tell a true story from a lie, on line. Last year I got some kind of weird bug up my ass and didn’t play. This year I’m playing for sure, though, because pea’s announced that she’s going to leave off blogging after today. This is her last blog-hurrah, and I intend to share it with her. So see if you can tell which of these three stories is not true - could be one, two, or all of them. I’ll clue you in on monday. No prizes for any winner or loser. The prize is that we all got to blog with pea for a while. That should be enough for most anyone.
(stories are in the extended entry, dude. make your guess in the comments.)
1. Rite of passage: at or about age 13 I got invited to a bunch of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs (bat mitzvahs were for girls, so I went to fewer of these). I don’t remember much about many of these events, because they were generally so profoundly unmemorable. The services were all about the same, and the receptions afterwards were unsullied by creative revelry. But I do remember one bar mitzvah reception where I might or might not have made a serious spectacle of myself: This celebration featured a DJ, as many of them did. One of the DJ’s jobs was to whip us all up into a mazel-tov frenzy. There was the typical candle-lighting ceremony, and some speeches, and all that kind of rigamarole, and then the DJ asked all the “kids” to come up to the center of the dance floor. I’d avoided that particular dangerzone up to that point, being not at all too sure of my ability to acquit myself respectably or even avoid injuring myself or others out there, but I dutifully went up with the rest of them when ordered by the master of ceremonies to do so. The DJ put on some horrible mid-70s dance music (it being, at the time, the mid-70s) and told us it was a “bump” contest, in which we were to “do the bump” until a champion “bumper” had been chosen by popular acclaimation. We all started dancing and my peers started being elliminated one by one. I just concentrated on staying upright. My hips swung with dangerous looseness from side to side and I felt myself getting a bit warm from the exercise. I swung wide and low, working my quads, ignoring the people gaping at us as I thrust my pubescent loins laterally. And suddenly it was over. The DJ stood next to me, alone on the floor, and asked me to announce myself as the winner of the contest. I think I won a 45 single of a doobie brothers song, but I don’t really recall that part. All I recall for sure was that I’d won the damn contest, and that, during my short walk home after the party, I began to wonder seriously what kind of an ass I’d made of my ass.
2: Omniscient Author: I was working my law gig, the most boring aspect of it imaginable. It was suffocating me so I was delighted when my sister told me there was a production of 12th Night for which she was stagemanaging and she wanted me to audition. It was just the creative outlet I needed and I wound up getting not just one part, but two - the two smallest, least substantial parts in the show, but two parts nonetheless. Rehearsals took place two nights a week at a high school gym in Mill Valley over in Marin, but I didn’t have to attend but one of those because I had so little to prepare. However, the process of auditioning and rehearsing felt really good, especially because I got to give voice to some words - even if they weren’t my own, I’d had damn little chance to say anything for some time because of the nature of my job, and I was delighted to be able to articulate anything at that point. But having thus started, the floodgates opened and I suddenly found myself writing again, as I hadn’t for quite a long time before. I scratched out a couple of essays, a short story, and then one day as I was driving out to Marin for rehearsal, I had a brainstorm for a longer work. Maybe even a novel. The specifics of the plot are not important to this tale, though. What’s important was that it was a fairly complicated braiding of five different stories, and that I’d written, longhand, about 40 pages - in my crabbed handwriting, in the large notebook I was using, that could have been 80 pages typed. In addition, I’d worked out the structure of the story and had notes on much of the exposition that I had yet to finish writing. I’d bring the notebook with me to rehearsals, and edit my work or add to it between my rare opportunities to work my scenes. But here, as Shakespeare might have said, is the rub: near the end of the rehearsal process, as we were excitedly approaching the set load-in and re-location of the production from the gym to the actual outdoor stage out by the beach where the production was to be mounted, I got overexcited. You know how actors can be, all improvs and giggles and focusing on the show instead of the reality of things.... in my addled thespianic state, I left my notebook behind one night. It was a week before we got back to the gym and by then the notebook was nowhere to be seen. I never recovered it, and that left me so frustrated that I have never tried rewriting that damn story cycle. Maybe it would have been good, and maybe not, but I sure as hell will never find out. That story, in every sense of the word, is now lost.
3: Long Haul: I was an older teenager, but not yet a college man. I’d started doing more bike riding, and was feeling lean and mean, fit and fine. I really didn’t think there was much I couldn’t handle as far as biking went. Of course, I was wrong, but I had to prove it to myself to believe it. My downfall came in the form of an attempt to ride from my home in Studio City out to Palisades Park. And then, of course, back. The thing I hadn’t acutally figured was that this was more than 35 miles, with a really tough climb up Sepulveda each way. But I was young and tough (in my own mind), so I forged forward. I had climbed my first hill strongly and was coming down into Brentwood when I first noticed an ache in my knee I’d suffered before. I knew that it was not going to go away - it was just going to get worse. But I was on the downhill part of the ride so I let the sore leg rest and did all the pedaling with the other one. (I don’t recall which was which anymore.) I did make it out to the park, which was even more beautiful than usual for having been reached by my own power. My folks had told me I wouldn’t make it, but I did. I felt great - until I tried to get back on the bike. My knee had gotten stiff and when I started pedaling back up the gradual incline of San Vicente toward the steep hill of Sepulveda, the pain came back - and with a vengeance. I tried to pedal one-footed again, but the hill wore me out and I didn’t want to blow out my good knee along with the bad one. I felt like I was going to have to quit, accept defeat, and call my dad. I hopped clumsily off the bike near Bundy and leaned on it, hyperventilating and aching, trying to catch my breath and strength so I could call my parents for a very inconvenient pick-up and a long “told-ya-so” talk on the drive back. As I stood there a man shuffled up to me. His clothes were filthy and torn, and he wore many layers of them; his skin was stained black with dirt and his hair was matted and chaotic. He looked me up and down and asked me, “You in trouble?” I answered, “No, just a little sore.” He nodded, grinning a decayed grin, and told me, “I know about that.” He indicated his feet, which we could both see through holes in his disintegrating shoes. They looked gangrenous and I suddenly realized their stench was going to make me gag soon. He told me then, “Sometimes I don’t think I can take another step. But then I do. It can hurt so bad sometimes, but if you gotta do it, you do it. Mind over matter, boy.” He nodded with unexpected sagacity and staggered slowly down the sidewalk. I got back on my bike, winced, and pushed off. The brief rest had done me some good; I got to the foot of the steep part of Sepulveda without extraordinary discomfort. I dismounted again, stretched out a little, tried to remember what real athletes did when they needed to gird up for an impossible feat. I started up the hill. It wasn’t as steep as I expected, but it sure was long. I had to stop several times and I even cried a little. I wondered, eventually, if I was doing myself any permanent damage. But that was when I saw the tunnel at the top that signalled the end of the climb. It wasn’t really close yet but it was within sight, so I lowered my head, subordinated the physical to the mental, and made myself pedal that granny gear till my whole body shook with the exertion. I looked up again just as I entered the tunnel. I didn’t have to pedal again till I reached Ventura Boulevard at the foot of the hill, just a few flat miles from my home. I took another rest and bore down for the final push home. When I got to my front lawn I was too tired to dismount and just fell over, my feet still in the cages. I was scraped up a little, and sore for weeks - but I’d done it. And that meant I would never have to do it again.
So, which one(s) are true? Which are false? Answers monday. Have a great weekend. If you dare.
