Dodging Storms

A study in opposites: a computer tech programming websites next to a full-face white helmet, white armored leather jacket, black armored pants.
I hurry my gear on, throwing the jacket with the spine protector over a canary yellow polo. My wallet, phone, ipod, and car keys are nestled in the backpack beside 2 laptops and a kindle. A struggle later and it’s slipped over my armored forearm. I’ll be the most expensive thing on two wheels in a minute or two.
It doesn’t look great out, the clouds are a little too ominous, the air is a little too sweet for less than a mile off the parkway. It’s going to come down, and I’m not quite ready for slick roads on two wheels.
“Hold on, your backpack is open.”
“Are the zippers on the side? Can you put them there?”
“Huh?”
“Uh, can you pull the zippers around to the side? When they’re on the top it opens. I’ve gotten home two or three times and it’s been wide open.”
“Yeah.” He closes my backpack up and I can feel him pull the zippers over.
“Thanks man! Have a good weekend.”
I snatch my helmet off the desk and walk down the hall. It occurs to me that I look huge; the armor adds a good inch to my frame, riding boots add another to my height, and I’m moving fast. I smirk at the thought of secretaries hurling stacks of paper as they dodge me.
I wave to the security guard as I pass his desk then pull my helmet over my head, snug against my face. Every piece of gear is important, every piece protects. When I see someone on a bike with shorts and a wifebeater, I wonder how long they’ll have their skin.
My bike stands out among behemoth SUVs, a dwarf there in the center of its allotted space.
My visor collects tiny gems. The storm is here.
Grasping the right handbrake I throw a leg over and sit in the saddle, turn the key, and kick up my kickstand.
Ignition.
Now to dance.
I slip through the parking lot, weaving on the asphalt floor and slithering around cement islands. Is it coming from the West, or the East? How long do I have until downpour?
The light to the on-ramp is red and I can see traffic is stopped going East from my vantage point opposite. If I go left I can do a few traffic tricks and jump the gridlock, but I’ll miss the HOV entrance. And the rain is coming.
The light changes.
Now the race.
I pull around the car in front of me and take the inner lane, jumping to the speed limit with a throttle wring then jumping lanes again to get around an SUV napping at the newly changed light. If traffic is light at the overpass…
Bingo! I slip in before the light changes and ride the service road. Traffic is still backed up. What a mess.
I wring the throttle again and leapfrog a line of cars using the entry to cut off the traffic, nestling in to the highway and starting the slow migration left toward the HOV.
There’s that feeling you get in traffic sometimes, after you’ve made a decision you wouldn’t normally make because of some new data - a sign blinking ‘Two Lanes Closed Exit 53’ and you wonder how close to 53 you should go before jumping on to the service road to dodge the bulk of traffic - and I’ve got it.
Thing is, in the car I’d just be in for a boring crawl in climate control. On the bike I’ll be taking a shower. Soppy wet underwear in waterlogged khakis. Raindrops at 55 miles an hour hurt.
Should have made the left.
But, I’m not wet yet. Keep crawling. Still have time.
I look over at a woman in an SUV scowling at the backup. Everyone seems to notice when you look at them from a bike, or they’re always about to look at the bike and you only sometimes notice. She turns to me, looks down at my two wheels and gives me a snide look. You’re fucked. Yep.
The lane moves. We’re a good quarter mile off and I swing out to peer down the lane. It’s open, the cars are favoring the right. That’s an invitation, right?
A drop of rain on the back of my neck. Go!
The white striped pre-entrance zone to the HOV will be deadly in another five minutes, coated by rain and slick as oil. For now its an ally against the traffic. I pass over it like a bird gliding over the ocean. Before me the sky is open, bright and blue but behind it is dark, ominous and vivid.
The entrance opens and I transition, no one near me.
I pull the throttle all the way out and catch the wind like an open parachute: every gust shakes me, I lock my neck to resist the buffeting winds. The storm approaches, gnashing at my back. Always check the weather in the morning. Idiot.
Little gemstones populate my visor, headlights flash on in my mirror. The clouds dance above, wisps and tails twist like tendrils, a shadow growing behind. 56. 55. Exits and miles between. A midnight blue Honda Accord, a white pickup truck. I wouldn’t wish a white pickup truck on my worst enemy.
Green sign overlooking the lane. “Motorcycles Permitted”. Thank god.
It’s darker. Raindrops on my windscreen. You never know when the rain will make every strip of paint a frictionless plane. Coming up on a bumper and the HOV exit to my real exit approaches.
I dart over the dotted line and pull the throttle, popping up to 70 and jumping past about fifteen queued cars. The road at the head of the snake is clear, I swing out and migrate to the outside lane.
The sky roars, a fine burning slice of light in the dark behind me. There’s a particular way the front of a storm looks, like a haze masking the vehicles, the paint on each car a shade darker then they should be.
I jump into the entrance lane, discarding all pretense of politeness. I’m about to be soaked, you’ll all be warm and dry. Let me squeeze on by, I swear you won’t even see me in a quarter mile.
I come up on backup up traffic at the merge, pick my spot between two cars, and slow for it. But the car I’ve picked isn’t moving as traffic accelerates. Is he napping? I jam the break, slow to a stop beside him.
He waves, knows perhaps. Or realizes why I am urgently darting between the hulking metal death machines. I wave, throw into gear and move up a spot. No time for pleasantry's my good man. Storms to dodge and all that.
The traffic eases, unbinds. We move. Storms comes.
There’s my exit. What’s another traffic violation? Go!
The great round burn. Exit arc.
Green light at the intersection: Bonus time! Left turn and I’m parallel to the storm front.
Weave like a skier, burst like a sprinter. Those your strengths, wouldn’t you know?
A grand curve, a switchback. Heading back at it. Can you dodge something you’re driving straight toward?
Answer: Yes. Dodging storms.
Home stretch, coasting to my parking spot.
Cover it, protect it, engine’s burning hot.
But we’re safe and dry.

Why Write? Oranges

Why write?

It's a devious question to ask. It's a dangerous question to ask. There are things you can do that have much simpler explanations: Why do you ride roller coasters? Because it's fun, it's a rush, I like that weird screaming/laughing thing people do on it. Why do you ride a motorcycle? I tried to convince myself it was because it was eco-friendly, but shit I just like the marriage of grace and screaming death you get from riding. Why do you drink? Because drunk. Simple.

But why write?

Writing is something for masochists. You basically go through 5 stages of writing a work and they follow thus:

1) Get an idea!

I have this great idea! I should write a (novel, poem, short story, etc).
You're super excited about your idea. You develop it in your mind, flesh it out, rack your brain on how to start it. Pretty soon it's boiling out your ears and all you want to do is commit it and rake in royalties for the next 10 years. You may piss off at work to scribble sentences in a notebook, you might spend lunchbreaks on a laptop, you may even carry notes in your cellphone.
Perfect title! Well, maybe a working title: "The Ur-Angeh"

2) You start to really write it

Yeah, now I'm getting in to the meat of it. The ideas are coming out on to the paper, it's all beautiful and pretty, and so easy!
You're etching meaning into something with permanence! Yes! Every sentence is another shining beacon of intellect and witty humor. You can smell the benjamins from here, move over 'Catch in the Rye', you're about to drop a bomb in the American subconscious.
That funny thing you did with the oranges was awesome, people are going to buy it just for that shit.

3) You start to really... actually... write it

Ugh, why is it taking so long to get this stuff out? I've been writing for 5 weeks straight! I've only got like, 40 pages! What the hell! This writing thing takes too long.
That boundless energy wears off. Now writing is just a second job you do at night once you're done cleaning off the barstools or teaching orphans how to read or murdering drifters to sell to the roach coach on Northern Boulevard.
I'll just half-ass some of those chapters. I can fill them in later. People will still be high on the oranges thing.

4) You finish it

I... I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I've only got forty pages and twelve storylines to tie in, then off to the presses!
Ah, you're very close! Perhaps you're like me and you like to write the last chapter at the midpoint and see how well things tie in, maybe you just know how it ends and you just 'feel' it coming. Either way you're just about there. Not long now, then you can take a break from your indentured servitude.
Maybe if I bring back the orange thing right before the end, then that first orange thing was only foreshadowing the real orange thing. Yeah, that's good.

5) You start editing it

I get to read it in it's entirety! This is going to be great, I can finally see where all my hard work went and OH MY GOD THIS IS AWFUL. WHAT WAS I THINKING? I used "orange" nine times in two sentences! What is wrong with me?
Now you get to start from the beginning and read the whole thing through as if you weren't the putz that wrote it. That will be fun right? WRONG. You learned things while you were writing, probably read books and generated a style for the story. Now the beginning is wonky and you can tell the exact moment that phase one wore off because the writing takes a dramatic nosedive. Now for the pain of editing...
Fucking oranges man.

In short, I write because I hate myself on a very deep personal level and I prefer the hell I control to the one I'd experience huffing paint fumes in the alley behind the Walmart.

Or because it's great to create an entire world, a society, and to lay a glamor over someone else and bring them into it to experience a world created entirely from your imagination. But that sounds a little too trite.

I'll go with 'drunk' again.

A Proper Introduction

Let's start this like any initial meeting should start: Hi, my name is Chris and I have a writing problem.

I've been at it, on and off, for most of my young adult life. My love of reading and writing began with Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber", which I must have read and re-read over ten times. In case you're unfamiliar (likely), it was a fantasy story about a family of titanic, crafty immortals vying for lordship over 'the one true reality' of Amber. It was one of the many worlds style books and rife with heroism, sarcasm, a bit of intrigue, some classic deus ex, and plenty of religious symbolism (the latter aspect was one of Zelazny's hallmarks).

Sadly, Zelazny died long before I realized I had to meet the man and I learned of his death something like a year and a half after it happened in '95. This crushed me; I worshiped this series and to know I'd never meet the man who wrote it was upsetting. To this day I refuse to read novels alleging to pick up where he left off that were written by other authors. Proving that I was kind of a moron, I didn't actually read any of his other stuff until much later on in my life.

I was captured more by the characters in his stories and their dynamics than anything else. I wrote my first stories about things that I had in my life, one was a many worlds story that was basically ripped straight from the Amber mythos that I craftily titled "Ruby" because I'm an ingrate. It wasn't anything worth mentioning besides the fact that I filled a 3 subject notebook with my inane scribbles and lost it sometime in the many years since. If I ever find it I might even transcribe a bit as a jab at my younger, stupider self.

After that I wrote something a little less derivative (only a little) about a game I was playing at the time called Infantry (and I think most 90's gamer nerds will have had some experience with that one) which involved energy guns, combat suits and flying surfboards. I would write that in a notebook too, ripping off the classes and the game dynamics while generating my own story about how it all came to be.

A friend of mine at the time would read it once or twice a week and comment on it until I took it off the rails and had the characters sucked in to a medieval setting through some sort of reality rift. This, I think, is where I first started to show a dueling ethos in my head: the more I consumed things the more my writing became this weird mash up of things I liked, gradually being copies of things less and less.

I wrote a story about mutants after that, which I thought was pretty clever but was mostly just me reading old X-Men comics after I inherited them due to a family member's passing. There was some pretty cool technologies in it, and I specifically remember the ISS making a big appearance as a massive intergalactic defense station (Master of Orion 2 was loaded up on my computer). This story made it in to the hands of my English teacher at the time, something which still embarrasses me to this day. I don't remember him commenting on it, possibly because he didn't actually read it. If so I'm quite certain I dodged a bullet; it was awful.

Now we're homing in a bit closer to the end of high school when I spent a lot of time writing a novel I called Azure (Zelazny would have sued my face off at this point). That one was all about magic and reality bending stuff, trying to tie magic in to the setting and the people in a believable way. My girlfriend at the time absolutely loved the story and when we broke up many years later I handed her the 3 subject notebook that contained the original work. The story still exists on my hard drive coming in at 146,309 words of utter garbage. I edited the work laboriously for many months before determining it would never be picked up, at least not in that form. But I'm a firm believer in the 'first novel is trash, and toss it' bit of wisdom, and will happily never seek print for it.

I took a long vacation from writing after the last piece. Looking back, it was the best thing for me: I grew up a lot and shed the last of my rampant plot robbery in the intervening years. I gained a real respect for reading and found many more genres once I let myself get away from it. That takes us up to now, where I'm working on a piece called RAM, which I'll talk about in later updates.

So that's my history, and I'm sticking to it.