Tilt Shift

Been awhile since I wrote. Not true, really, since I do write now and again. It's just that lately when I write and re-read, I find myself the victim of what one jolly joker called "The Tilt Shift."

 The Tilt Shift: n. A phenomenon in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you put it down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths — peaceable, generic and out of focus.

Just so.

Have you ever written anything that made you want to apologize for making anyone sit through it? Been doing a lot of that lately even if the apologies have mostly been to myself since even I rarely have the balls or temerity to sic it on anyone else. I have seen and done a lot, even recently, that seems like it ought to just write itself.  Maybe it's a symptom of burnout, but the fact is that my life of late has seemed bland as oatmeal porridge and it damned sure reads that way. 

I've spent a lot of time in the military and Done Stuff there that I promise you that no one you know has done. And much time since has been spent in a variety of occupations that simply reek of human drama and tragedy and comedy and all the often juicy and usually noxious bits of underbelly noir. And, occasionally, I'll begin to write it down.

"Meh." That's what I get when I re-read it, sometimes along with, "It is impossible that anyone could give a shit about this."

If you've seen the movie "True Lies," (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis) you know the kind of stories I'm talking about. He's a high-end government spy and she's about to have an affair with some dweeb, and both of them tell the other long, involved (fabricated) stories about their bore-ya-stiff days. (Her spending about 10 minutes explaining how she went up and down several floors trying various models of copier before she heroically managed to get the meeting notes done just in time is a classic…)  

Lately my whole life feels like their phony stories, and on paper reads like the yammerings of the old geezer rocking on the front porch after trapping some luckless younger relative with a story that begins "Well, I remember that time back in '36…" which story has been heard dozens of times, all of which were, impossibly, progressively, even more boring than the first telling.

So, I try fiction.  The results are…well, I think "mixed" would be a good description.

1.  Horror — nope. No matter how bleak, dark, or bloody I write it, it simply doesn't compare to real life.  I know, it's not supposed to compare, but when I re-read it and literally laugh out loud at the silliness of it, it's on the way to the has-bin (i.e., the recycle bin.) I once let a person read one of these, and she handed it back a day or two later with some notes, shaking her head and said that the bottom line was it "…freaked me the fuck out." 

I suspect she was just being nice because (a) she's pretty hard to freak out and (b) she wants me to read something of hers and doesn't want to piss me off.  Assurances that this won't happen don't seem to mean much.

2.  Comedy — nope.  My sense of humor is usually pretty dark, in the same sense that fish are usually pretty wet. (But as you see, my sense of understatement is up and running just fine.) If I tell a joke to co-workers that's received with laughs, I can pretty well bet that running that same joke past regular humans gets me the "What the fuck is wrong with you?" glare. Translate and extrapolate that into an entire story or book.

3. Tragedy — nope.  See "Horror" above.  Real life trumps my imagination to the point that it's futile trying to make any up that doesn't make me roll my eyes and snerk at any attempt to take it seriously.

In all these genres, my real life is MUCH more salient than any fiction I can come up with.

So, smartass, I tell myself, there's your answer.  Write it down!

Meh. Real life on paper tastes of cardboard and distilled water.  Didn't always seem like that. I must be getting old.

I also broke my bike again which may or may not be related. 

I was running about 95 the other night, hilly two-lane road, dark as a blind-fish cave, Veronica's battle-song rising full-throated over the howling wind blast. The moon looked like a fat fingernail clipping low on the horizon, barely clearing the trees behind thin, scudding clouds and provided no light at all. We roared down the narrow asphalt ribbon, melded man-machine, smoothly dodging barely seen reflections that may or may not have been eyes glowing out of the brush, deer ready to jump into the road, a suicidal 200 pound meat and bone barrier, and die taking us out for whatever Holy cause motivates them. 

I crested the top of a hill and began the drop down into the valley. The centerline dots glowed in my high-beam, zippering up the invisible black hill on the other side in front of me to the sky, it seemed. I love nights like that. I hit the bridge across the stream in the middle of the valley and twisted the throttle, headed for 100. Of course I blew an oil hose, which soaked my right leg ankle to knee with hot oil and caused a variety of control issues, tedious in the telling, but right fucking sporty in the execution. 

Got it shut down (which seemed to take forever.) After spending a fair bit of time getting my ass to let go of the seat so I could get off the bike, I got out my small tool kit and began working inches from the instantly-skin-melting heat of the engine with a small flashlight gripped in my teeth which made my cursing sound funny enough that I laughed and dropped it just as I had two hands full and could do nothing about it. It rolled about three feet and helpfully lit up an ancient, discarded root-beer can. I half-rigged a seal on the blowout in the hose down by the oil cooler with electrical tape, the sloppiest barely-effective patch you've ever seen or heard of. We finally limped back home.  The shop tells me two weeks for parts.

So I'm in kind of a mood anyhow.

And how are y'all doing?

In Our Next Episode: Shopping. Veronica's been looking lonely.  My vote is to go buy another bike.