character

Character


Copyright 2006, Rusty Penn

I'm the worst kind of writer there is: the kind that doesn't write.

When I get around to it, I can usually scribble down a sentence or two that holds together, or if the muse is with me, maybe even a whole paragraph. But I've got libraries of novels inside me and they never seem to find their way out. When I walk around outside, going about my business, doing my daily whatever, I narrate inside my head. When my activities are too dull to warrant narration, I plot and I characterize, and I compose. But I never write that stuff down, because I rarely have any paper when I'm doing my daily whatever. It's there, though, always. Ever-present in the back of my mind, narrating, composing, telling stories. If I could write all that down and sell just a tiny bit of it, I'd make a fortune.

It's a shame, really. I have some aptitude for it, I guess, at least my teachers always told me I did. It's just that it's hard and I've always been a bit of a slacker. I managed one good piece of writing in my life, and one piece of magic. Real magic, too, not just a slieght-of-hand trick or a smoke-and-mirrors illusion. That's not so bad, right? That's acheivement, yeah?

I snorted myself awake and gathered my bearings, quickly wishing I hadn't. My bearings had been fine where they were, lost in the twilight of a pleasant nap. Way down from my perch in the bleachers, clean shaven Prof. Beardsley continued to draw supply and demand curves on the blackboard -- the very same activity which had prompted me to doze off in the first place. I glanced at the wall clock, but it was too far off to tell me the time, so I checked my watch. I still had an hour and a half of economic torture to endure before I could go to sleep proper.

My notebook was still open, and I could see where the writing transitioned from barely coherent economics notes into totally incoherent sleep scribbling. Then, curiously, the sleep scribbling transitioned again, this time into actual writing. That was odd, to be sure. I must have written something in my sleep.

There is no governor anywhere, I had written. Ah, I thought, very cute. This weren't my words. I read them in a book, and the author of that book read them in a book, and so on, backwards in time, until ancient China where someone named Zhuangzi wrote them in a book. I didn't know any of that history back then, except, of course, for the part where I had read the words in a book.

I had read them all right, and even written them in my sleep. But I didn't get them. Well, I "got" them, I just didn't get them, you know? Later in life I came to use the word *know* (with the little puckers, to distinguish it from plain-old-know) to describe the state of deep, internalized, personalize comprehension of a subject. Heinlein called it "grok." Same idea. I got my word (puckers and all) from a video game. It's hard to be creative all the time. Sometimes you've just got to borrow.

Anyhow, I knew the words, but I didn't know them with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my being (I borrowed that, too). That *knowing* would come later.

One time, I had an idea for a story. It was about a guy who was very similar to me. (All the stories I thought up back then were about guys very similar to me. I had a narrow field of experience and my imagination was limited to extrapolation.) This was back in the days before the Internet had become popularized. In those days it was the realm of college students and one or two AOLers. The good old days.

So this guy spent a lot of time on IRC, which was the good-old-days equivalent of modern day Internet chat rooms. He didn't get out much at all, and pretty much all of his socializing, such as it was, was done online. But one day, one of his chat buddies, who lived across town, invited him (the character, the one based "loosly" on me) over to watch a movie or something. The guy walks over to his buddy's apartment (the guy doesn't have a car) and knocks on the door. Nobody answers. The guy knocks and knocks and knocks, and, this being set in the era before ubiquitous cellular phones, gives up and walks back home.

With nothing better to do, he hops back on IRC, where the very buddy whose apartment he just failed to visit is sitting there in the chat room. The guy asks his buddy where the hell he'd been, and the buddy is confused. The buddy swears that he's in his apartment and has been all day long. The guy confirms the address, and it's just what he thought it was. So he sets out to visit his pal again, and, arriving once more at the apartment, knocks on the door. Once again, there's nobody home.

Angrily, the guy walks back to his own apartment. But as he's walking across town, he notices something odd: all the shops are vacant. There are no cars in the streets, even though it's mid-afternoon. He sees no people anywhere. The guy walks into a grocery store and there's nobody there. The power is all on, and the video cameras track, and the automatic lettuce waterers still seem to work. But no people.

Spooked, the guy continues on back to his apartment where, once again, he hops on the IRC. All his buddies are on, and he tells them what he's seen. They tell him he's nuts.

Anyhow, over the course of a few hours and days, this guy determines that, for some reason, he can communicate with his friends and his parents and strangers and anyone he likes via electronic means, but outside his apartment, nobody else in the entire world seems to exist. Stores are empty (but open and stocked), parks are vacant, streets are uninhabited. His mail is delivered but he never sees the mailman. You get the idea. You've probably seen a Twilight Zone episode with the same idea.

That was the set-up, I never did decide on the rest of the story. Maybe the guy decides to engage in a life of crime, stealing unattended bananas and diamonds and televisions and stuff. Or maybe he goes insane. Or maybe he doesn't -- since he's still got his friends online. Maybe he sets off a nuke to see if it shows up on the evening news, which he can still watch.

Who knows? Like all my stories, I never wrote it down.

I went to college for the same reason everyone goes to college: to find out what I wanted to do with my life. In my case, though, I had an edge. I was already good at something, and I knew I was good at it, and at the time, what I was good at was worth a lot of money. In fact, in the four years it took me to graduate with a degree in what I'm good at, the average salary for people good at what I'm good at went through a quick tripling. That was nice.

Since I knew what I was good at but didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I came up with a plan. I would study hard, get a degree, and get a high paying job programming computers. Then, in my spare time, while raking in obscene gobs of cash, I'd figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Then, as the plan went, I'd do it.

Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of my plan.

I got that high paying job, and a bunch of raises, and a bunch of stuff that I bought with my bunch of raises. I wasn't especially happy with my job, or my life, but I also wasn't especially unhappy. That's how it goes, I guess, for most people. And just as most people, when they're not happy but not unhappy, don't make changes in their life, I let my life keep on going the way it was going. Which is to say, nowhere in particular.

I was supposed to be deciding in my spare time what it was that I wanted to do with my life, but I wasn't doing that. Maybe the problem was that I already knew: I wanted to be a writer. But In addition to my inability to actually write, so far as writing involves recording the thoughts of the writer, I also feared the transition from highly-paid computer programmer to destitute writer, "successful" or no.

Did I mention I didn't have a love life? Not that I had a lousy one. No, I didn't have one at all and I wasn't heading anywhere that I'd likely collide with one.

So. Things weren't really going that well.