Death and Guitars

Featured / brackett / 1 Comment

It occurred to me today that there is some connection in my life between death and guitars, as strange as that might seem.

* * *

In a couple of weeks, we will remember the fifteenth anniversary of my only brother’s death. It hardly seems possible to me that it has been fifteen years that he’s been gone. My three children, all high school and college age, were so young when Steve died as to have almost no memory of him today. So much has happened in the years since — so many developments. Progress that’s been made and I often wonder what he’d have to say. Changes in the world, and in the lives of the people who love him the most, and I’d love to be able to share those things with him.

When Steve died, there were a few of his earthly possessions that became my possessions. Many of these things I still consider to be his — when I hold them, I think of them as his. My children have inherited some of what was Steve’s — their uncle’s. Of all of those items, two of the most emotional for me are his guitars — a cheap, cherry red Series 10 electric guitar and a nicer Gibson Epiphone acoustic. When I took these items into my home, I swore that I was going to learn how to play them. Jennie, my wife, even went so far one year as to go through the work of having the Gibson refurbished so I could learn how to play on a nice instrument.

In fifteen years, I’ve not learned to play the guitar. Mostly, I’ve learned how to dust instruments that no one ever uses. I’ve learned how to feel guilty about opportunities that I fail to take advantage of.

But, in the past couple of days, I’ve gotten closer. Due to another death.

* * *

Back in early July, a cousin of mine died by suicide. And, as distant as I am to most of my cousins –unfortunately– this death has been a bit harder to deal with. Maybe the nature of the circumstances. Maybe the guilt that I feel for not being a better relative. I suppose that we all have people to whom we could stand to be a little closer, relationships that we could be doing more work to cultivate. As Frost once said, “way leads on to way.”

I’ve felt guilty more than once in the past four months about his death, as many of us certainly have. Whether or not it’s right for me to feel this way, I wonder whether or not I could have done more to be a better cousin, a better friend. More on that in a little bit.

A few days ago, my mother and father and I went to help my aunt with some of my cousin’s belongings. A truly strange experience, if you’ve never had the pleasure, for lack of a better word. I felt a significant range of emotions when we were looking through piles of this and stacks of that. This item would stir up this old story and that knickknack brought to mind that old memory. I was excited to see certain things and happy to learn things about the cousin that I’d not done a better job of getting to know. Going through those things, I was (and am) grieved by his death. I was also curious, and frustrated, and weirded out. Who’s going to end up fingering through the different attachments that I have for my MagicBullet? Who’s going to make decisions about which of my space heaters ought to go to whom?

So strange. And sad.

Of course, I tended to gravitate toward the things that had cords and cables attached –> if you know me, this makes sense. Ever since I was young, whether it was a yard sale or a dumpster dive (yes, I used to jump into dumpsters as a kid, especially if there were speakers or other A/V equipment), I’ve always been drawn toward used tech and the story that it sometimes tells. I found a pile of old video game equipment at my cousin’s house — controllers and game discs and cabling and such. I laid claim to a video game system that seemed to be broken (it was the second of two such systems, the other one still attached to the TV in the living room) and some other parts and pieces. Among the pile was a video game called Rocksmith. I’d never heard of it, but it was in amongst some Guitar Hero games that I grabbed. My aunt and I shared some stories about video games, including the story that I told about my son Garrett watching me play Guitar Hero when he was just a lad.

More about that in a minute.

* * *

The year is 2008. And, as long as I end up living, I will never forget what I did in the days immediately after my brother’s death.

I worked on his laptop.

His wife –widow– told me, when we arrived in their neighborhood, that their laptop was malfunctioning and that there were so many photos on the laptop’s hard drive that needed to be retrieved for the obligatory photo collages that people would look through during the funeral services and wakes. So, that’s what I did. I focused my grief and anger and fear and confusion after Steve’s death into the repair of his laptop. I got it running (or maybe I got the photos off of the drive, I can’t remember), and the photo collages were built, and I contributed an answer in a time of so many questions. While we all cried and held each other and tried to find answers, I was working on getting that laptop going. It was my mission. My focus.

It was what I could do, when I knew that I felt helpless in just about every other way.

That laptop eventually ended up in a recycling pile, no doubt. And those photo collages are no longer being poured over by mourners. But, being able to do that thing made me feel focused on something other than the grief. It distracted me.

* * *

The pile of my cousin’s belongings that I brought to my home kept me busy most of this past weekend. Some of the things needed to be cleaned. I cleaned those. Other pieces needed to be repaired, and I repaired those. As I was doing it, I thought of my brother’s laptop. I thought about my cousin’s suicide. The distraction of having something to fix. The feeling of being useful, even if it’s never going to be the case that my cousin wants his malfunctioning video game system to be repaired.

When I got the game system repaired (it needed a new hard drive), I loaded the Rocksmith game. It’s apparently Guitar Hero on steroids, in case you didn’t know. In fact, with a special cable, which just so happened to be in the pile of cables that I took from my cousin’s house, you can hook up an actual guitar and learn how to play it, via the game. As of the moment when I got the whole ball of wax working, I’ve been playing my brother’s guitar plugged into my cousin’s video game. Two deaths. Two inheritances. And me, trying to put the pieces together to be able to do what I said I was going to do.

* * *

I’m not sure what I was hoping to say with this blog post. Maybe it was more about catharsis than anything else –> expressing a wound. But then again, perhaps I can tie this big giant mess of my emotions up with a few closing thoughts.

1) I’ve heard it said the you ought to use things and love people, and not the other way around. Maybe I would have more time to be a more involved friend or family member if I was less interested in gaining things and fixing things and playing with things. I’ll work on that. Maybe, you could work on that, too. Put down that thing you’re doing (other than reading this blog post) and go tell someone how much you care. It might be the case that they need to hear it more than you know.

2) I’ve owned my brother’s two guitars for a decade and a half. And, while there’s no guarantee that I am going to be a world-class picker anytime soon, I can say that I have this cool video game from my cousin to help me along the way. I guess, sometimes, the pieces don’t fit until you’ve completed a bigger section of the puzzle. And that’s okay. The plan is the plan. The important thing is progress. Be further down the line tomorrow than you were yesterday. Toward your goals. Toward being the best that you can be.

3) I think the one thing that I most want to say comes out of the way that I felt, coming home from my cousin’s house this past weekend –> although we might sometimes feel very alone, and although we might sometimes get stuck in a darkness that seems so deep that there is no way out, I want you to know that I am here. If you’re reading this and you need someone to talk to, if you’re stuck and alone and needing someone to help, or just to listen, I AM HERE. I know that my guilt is mine to deal with, and I should have been a better friend to my cousin. But, I want everyone reading this final sentence to know that I am here, and I’ll be by your side in a moment if you tell me that you’re stuck, and it’s dark, and you need me to be there for you.

November Rain

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It occurred to me today that we need to clarify the statement that time heals all wounds.

A rainy November day can trick you, if you let it, into thinking that spring’s just around the corner, rather than being months away, on the other side of a winter that you’d rather not endure. The smell in the air is damp, but you can almost lie to yourself and believe that the rain is going to enliven the plants and start the trees to budding. To look around, everything is dead in the outdoor world — in November, just as in March. The grass has changed from its vibrant green shade to a gray green hue that’s pale like a corpse without any mortician’s makeup. The deciduous trees are all leafless, and the blisters that you got from raking those leaves have most likely all healed, but only a few weeks ago rather than months ago, so the lie isn’t that easy to fall for.

But, you can almost do it, especially if that’s the lie that you want to believe. There is no winter coming, with its slick driving conditions and bone-chilling temperatures that make you wonder if you’ll ever be warm again. It’s behind, and this rather cold rain is going to be followed –not by snow flurries and blizzards– but by a slightly warmer rain next week and the week after. It’s all about the lie that we want to believe, I guess. That lie that tells us what we want to hear. For me, I want to believe that the winter is over, rather than on its way. It’s like a coming pain that I see approaching on the horizon. I can’t deny it. I can’t even really lie to myself about it. At least, not convincingly enough to clear the horizon’s landscape. The pain is coming, and the rain is like tears. Happy tears, perhaps, in the spring, or sad tears in the fall. They both wet the ground.

* * *

If you were alive and listening to music in the early 1990s, then the title of this blog post might take you back to 1992, when Guns N’ Roses released the song “November Rain” (oops, I’m just now realizing that the rain I stepped out into this morning is actually December rain). The song, released in 1992, was off of an album that they released the year before called Use Your Illusion 1 (Use Your Illusion 2 came out on the same day, that September). I couldn’t recall this morning what the song was about, but it came into my head as I was thinking about cold rain and the somber reality of rain in the late fall. So, I pulled it up and listened to it.

The song is some amorphous, pensive, unrequited love song, and it’s not at all the way that I’m feeling this morning, but when I was writing my morning journal, the thought just jumped into my head that I was writing about November Rain (which I wasn’t — it’s December) and that there might be a connection. Listening to the song, and discovering what I had forgotten years ago, that it’s a love song about two people who just can’t seem to bring themselves to love each other in the same way at the same time — it’s not the easiest connection to make when I’m writing about pain and death and dying and loss and mourning and grief. But, I listened to the song –more engaged in a nostalgic experience than anything else– having committed myself to listening to the beginning and therefore the end. I’m glad I went all the way through. The final line of lyrics in the song provided me the connection that I am hoping to make in this blog entry. Axl Rose says, “Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.”

It made me realize that the pain that we often feel in this life, as difficult and striking as it is, is like everything else in this life — temporary. That connection from that last line of lyrics redeemed the song for me to be able to use it in this blog entry.

* * *

I really stepped into it this morning –kind of like quicksand– and now I’m quite suddenly left processing a bunch of emotions that I didn’t even expect that I was going to be feeling today. I have a friend who’s dying of cancer, and the diagnosis was quite sudden, and the prognosis isn’t very good. Seeing that things are pretty dire has me thinking about pain and death in a way that is emotionally difficult.

And, of course, all of this thinking this morning –about death and dying and pain and mourning and tears and grief– got me to thinking about my brother. After 15 years without him, the pain isn’t what it used to be. Having lived with that pain for 15 years, I was under the impression that –at some point– it wasn’t going to hurt anymore. That was probably naïve and foolish on my part, the relic of a lifetime that –fifteen years ago– had not necessarily been deeply scarred by that much grief. But, as life brings us new experiences, we learn.

I’ve learned that time doesn’t heal all wounds. Not in the way that I thought it would. I think we would be better off to say something like, “time makes pain less painful”, because I’m discovering that the deepest pains don’t seem to ever stop being painful. This morning, with a simple journal entry about rain, and a quick run through of a song from my high school days, here I am stuck in the quicksand that I didn’t even know that I was stepping into. I almost called the blog entry, “Quicksand”.

* * *

I highlighted a line up above. I wonder if you caught it. “I’m glad I went all the way through.” The first section of this blog post, right after the introductory line, was my journal entry from this morning. If you don’t journal, I’d highly encourage you to give it a try. It has made a pleasant difference in my life. This morning’s journal entry –about the rain that’s plagued Michiana over the past few days– wasn’t really about the rain, as it turned out. So, I listened to some music, and as it so often does, the music brought me some additional clarity.

Time pulls us forward, at a speed of sixty minutes per hour, and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. But, in the face of grief and loss and pain, you are certainly at your own liberty to stop moving forward. Like an old, nostalgic song that you could quit listening to. But, that forgotten line –the line that ends up being the balm to the hurt– is the line that is just around the corner.

Don’t quit listening to the song. The most important line of lyrics is just around the corner.

I can’t imagine that I’ve ever thought of Axl Rose as a sage, and I’ve been listening to his lyrics for more than three decades. And, I still don’t know if “November Rain” is going to ever end up on my list of favorite songs by Guns ‘N Roses. But, that last line is definitely a keeper — “nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.”

Pain’s coming. Don’t lie to yourself or try to convince yourself that it’s not. That’s delusional, in the end. Rather, know that time takes the edge off the pain. There is an other side to the experience of grief and loss, and the journey to that place doesn’t last forever. The rains end. The winter fades.

I’m glad I went all the way through.

Puppets

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Have you ever wondered who’s pulling your strings?

* * *

The other day, I was working my way through some cyber security training that I have to complete for my job. One of the things that the video said has been stuck in my brain for days, trying to work its way out.

The video said, in several different places, that many of the types of scams that people fall prey to on the internet are deceptions that rely on emotional responses. The video talked about being wary when an email or a text message –or any other kind of message for that matter– makes you feel excited or scared, because those kinds of messages trick us into taking action without thinking about it.

Can you believe this?!?! They are using our emotions against us, to trick us?!?!

Being emotional and then making decisions without fully considering them is –apparently– one of the defining characteristics of people who end up falling for cyber security scams of various different kinds. And I know that the school district’s insurance agency is interested in the employees of the school district not being the kind of people who make rash, hasty decisions based on the emotions that we are made to feel by the perpetrators who send us these messages.

But, then I got to thinking…

* * *

During the past couple of family vacations that my family has taken together, I’ve been fond of saying to my fellow family members –and they’ve turned it back on me, as well– “find your chi”. It’s become a bit of a joke, but my intended message behind the quip has been to remind all of us that we can center ourselves consciously and intentionally, choosing to disengage with emotional escalation when it happens.

If you’ve ever been on a family vacation before, you know what I’m talking about when I mention emotional escalation. Expectations, frustrations, delays, and last-minute plan changes – they all have a way of getting us riled up. A certain member of our family, who will remain nameless in their defense, had an emotional melt-down just like this in the Epcot Center at Disney. Others of us have had our outbursts at other places, at other times.

But when Dad says, “Find your chi”, it either 1) makes us laugh at things, or 2) it reminds us all to consciously pull-out of the emotional response cycle.

More on that in a minute.

The problem with the emotional response cycle is that we put our intellect on hold as we go off the deep-end with our emotions. If you’ve never noticed it before, take a moment –while you’re reading this– to think about the last time that you had an emotional outburst. Was it something that you gave a lot of consideration to? Was it something that you were thinking hard about while you were doing it? Did the outburst seem like an intelligent thing to you, when you looked back at it –after it had happened– with the power of your intellect?

Of course, the answers to these questions is ‘no’.

* * *

Have you ever wondered whether or not we’re all being manipulated? I’m becoming more and more convinced of that, with each passing day.

Of course, the problem is that we are allowing it to happen.

Yesterday was the mid-term election, and my wife won the seat that she was working to gain on our local school board. I am very proud of her, and the kind of campaign that she ran, and I am especially proud of the kind of woman that she is and the great school board member that I know that she’s going to be.

During the whole process, though, I got emotional several times.

When the woman on Facebook called my wife a liar and attacked her character, you can only imagine how emotional I got. I was mere inches away from launching the warbirds, believe you me.

When we discovered the nature of some of the other candidates that my wife was running against, I got emotional. I’m still emotional, just thinking about it, even after the fact. Even as I’m typing this.

When my wife was hounded by people who thought it appropriate to ask her all manner of irrelevant questions, it was hard for all of us not to become emotional.

In other words, we ‘lost our chi’.

The problem is this: it would seem that we now live in a world where people are going to attempt to rile us up, on purpose, for their own ends. If an email scammer wants me to click on a link and they know they can do it by getting me excited or angry or scared, that’s the world that we live in now. If the news media outlet that you watch is prepared to scare you or excite you or anger you by showing you what they choose to show you, that’s the world that we live in now. If people on social media are posting to yank your chain, to get you to bite on the hook that they’ll sink into your jaw once you’ve become engaged in their petty bickering, that’s the world that we live in now.

But, you still have a choice.

Step one is always to find your chi. As a Christian, I’m not encouraging you to go on a Zen Buddhist pilgrimage to locate your spiritual center. Much of that stuff ends up just being hogwash. But, I do believe in an emotional and spiritual center. You should get used to the practice of locating yours.

Disengage from the emotional escalation, so you can take a step back and rationally think about what’s happening right in front of you. I find, myself, that the easiest way to do this is to breathe.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. As you do, disconnect from the emotions you were feeling. Get off of the roller coaster.

The next step is, then, to opt out.

The puppet masters are pulling our strings and they’re doing it by emotionally manipulating us. The next time something, or someone, gets you charged up, find your chi and then ask yourself…

Am I being manipulated?

Chances are, the answer’s ‘yes’.

So, stop allowing it.

I confess that I, far too often, give away the control that I have over myself and my reactions by ceding that control as I suspend my intellect and decide instead to get emotional.

Maybe you do, too?

It’s time for us to cut these puppet strings, I think.

Less

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I got to thinking this morning about math, which is somewhat unusual for an English teacher, but bear with me for a little while and let’s see where this goes.

I was thinking about the four basics — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Those four basics are taught to everyone during their earliest school days. They form the foundation of how we are able to do the math that we need to regularly do.

Have you ever noticed that they form two teams? Addition and multiplication are on a team, and division is on a team with subtraction, of course.

Why would I say that? Because of the results.

When you think about subtraction and division, the result is always less; with addition and multiplication, the result is always more. At least when it comes to basic mathematics. Don’t ask about negative numbers and such.

For example, 4-2=2. The answer (2) is less than the original number (4). Or 6÷4=1.5. The answer (1.5) is less than the original number (6).

As I was thinking about it this morning, I was thinking about the four functions and how I feel about them. It occurred to me that I like multiplication and addition more than I like division and subtraction. More on this in a little bit.

* * *


I did something the other day that I’ve never done before. I voted in an election and I didn’t vote for Congressman Fred Upton. That’s because Fred isn’t running this year. He’s leaving Congress at the end of his current term, for a couple of different reasons. Ever since 2000, when I was first able to vote for Fred during one of his re-election processes, I’ve been voting for Fred Upton.

Now, regardless of how you feel about Fred Upton from a partisan perspective –whether you identify with him or you don’t– it’s hard to argue with his track record of getting things done as a politician. In fact, one of the most impressive things about Fred, if you ask me, is his record of bipartisanship. As a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House of Representatives, and even before such a caucus existed, for as long as he’s been in Congress, Fred’s worked across the aisle to find common ground on issues that appeal to a wide base of voters, critical issues facing the nation.

While most of Washington D.C. is gridlocked by political game-play, bipartisanship is what gets things done — underground and behind-the-scenes. Because this politician occupies this position, and they disagree with that politician who believes something else, collaboration is becoming rarer and rarer.

In fact, what is bipartisanship, really, except for the addition of my solution to your solution, in order to reach a compromise, something greater?

Did you see what I did there? Addition. Math that results in more.

And, in a world that suffers from too much division, Congress is going to be hurting for one less representative like Fred Upton.

* * *


I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed before, but I think our big problem, as a nation, is a math problem. It’s a problem of division.

The thing about division, as I described earlier, is that you end up with less.

I’ve decided that I’ve had just about enough with people who are working to increase the divide among the citizens of the nation. The partisan bickering and the polarized political posturing. It’s disgusting and barbaric and I’m not going to take it lying down anymore.

In honor of Congressman Fred Upton, and in keeping with my unfortunately limited trend of voting for collaborative people as candidates, I am devoting myself to voting for compromisers, moving forward. You’re a Republican? Great. You’re a Democrat? Wonderful. From now on, I just need to know if you’re a collaborator. Are you going to reach across the aisle? Get things done? Compromise with your fellows? Then, you can have my vote.

As many of you know, my wife is running for a position on the local school board where we live, and I’ve got to tell you – it’s been quite the experience. Now, before I go any further, let me be perfectly clear: a position on a school board in Michigan is not a partisan position. You don’t have to declare a party affiliation to run for school board. Your name doesn’t appear on a ballot for school board with party information alongside it.

Nevertheless, you’ve got people these days who want to turn everything into a polarized, political debate.

And, the reason why is simple.

Division.

I am flipping done with it. You know why?

Because, with division, you end up with less.

How much can we accomplish when we’re divided?

LESS.

What kind of a future is there for a divided nation?

LESS.

How much can an organization accomplish when its members are divided against each other?

LESS.

While my wife is interested in doing her best for the people of our town, and for their students in our school district, other people in the town are interested in division. Additionally, they’re gaining a bit of a following –of course– from other people who are also interested in division. The problem is… wait for it… with division, you end up with less.

I don’t know what people think is going to happen if and when they elect people who are interested in division, but if you’re looking for an example of how this all turns out, you need not look any further than the nation’s capital. You know, that funny part of the nation that we all point at and laugh about as dysfunctional and ineffective. We chuckle because it’s all the way over there and it’s not that big of a problem for us.

Am I wrong for thinking that such division should be banned from offices where ACTUAL WORK NEEDS TO BE ACCOMPLISHED?????

When D.C. politics leads to faulty leadership, what effect does it have on me? Sure, we all end up with less, but it just seems so distant. Not as big of a problem. It’s quite a different story when my local school board doesn’t function because division has been introduced. What’s going to happen when divisive elements elect a divisive representative who fosters division in an organization?

I’ll tell you what happens.

Less.

Stephen and I

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There have only been a few constants during my life as a reader. The two that come most readily to mind are science fiction and Stephen King. While I would probably identify science fiction as my favorite genre of fiction, I know without a doubt that my favorite fiction author is Stephen King. Ever since I was a young teenager, and my parents first started allowing me to buy my own books to read, some thirty years ago, I would choose to buy Stephen King books time and time again. The first Stephen King book I remember buying, and still a favorite of mine to this day, was a novel called “Needful Things”. I bought it at Majerek’s — a bookstore in nearby Niles. Ever since, I’ve been reading what Stephen King’s been writing and loving it.

More recently, over the last thirteen years or so, I’ve been really dedicated to working on my Stephen King collection. In the library of my house, I have a whole bookshelf, eight feet tall and three feet wide, of Stephen King books. Starting very seriously in 2009, I worked to read them all, and to own them all. As of this point, I’ve read them all and I own almost all of them — which is to say that some of them are hard to find.

It’s been the case, for as long as I’ve been reading Stephen King’s fiction, that I’ve enjoyed the storytelling that he does. Each of his stories is easy to follow, and I get involved with the characters very deeply, and the suspense is always very palpable and enjoyable. Not only has he been my favorite to read, he’s also taught me a bit about what makes for a good story. In being an aficionado, I feel like I’ve also been able to become a better writer. It was King, in fact, who said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Since 2009, I’ve been working on the first item in his list.

After the point in time when I got ‘caught up’ — that point where I’d read everything he’d written — I felt accomplished, like some majestic peak had been conquered. To be honest, these days, I usually pre-order his novels so that I don’t even have to remember when the next one is coming… Amazon just delivers it to me when it’s available to the public. FYI – his next is coming on September 6th. Remember that date.

* * *

I’ll bet when my mother read the title of this piece, she thought I’d be talking about my brother — Stephen. Then, when the first section came and went, and not a mention of him was made, she was probably growing disappointed. Hi, Mom!

When I think of all of the writing that I’ve been doing, and the steps that I’ve been taking toward accomplishing this ‘writing’ dream of mine, I’ve wondered more than a few times about what my brother would think. Almost fourteen years ago, my brother tragically and accidentally passed away. And, while the pain of those days has evolved into a different kind of an ache, all these years later, I often still wonder –when certain things are going on in my life– what my brother Stephen would think of such things.

My first-born child, my son will be moving into his dorm at Western Michigan University next week, the same university that my brother graduated from. I’ve often wondered what he would think of that.

My certificate of copyright came in the mail today, from the Library of Congress, certifying that I own the copyright on the stories that I published in July. When it came, and I opened it, I wondered what he would think of it. I honestly wanted to show it to him.

My wife is seeking public office and I’m running around my town –our town, Jen’s and Stephen’s and mine– planting campaign signs in yards and hyping her up to everyone that I talk to. Sometimes, when I look at my wife’s campaign signs as we drive by them, I wonder what he would think of it.

Growing up, I was the older brother, but I looked up to him for being as popular and friendly and outgoing as he was. He always had more friends than I did, and he was always involved in fun and exciting things that made me envious. He was bolder and more courageous, while he was alive, than I’d ever managed to be up to that point in time. But, since his death, I’d have to say that I’ve had my moments.

2022 has been a year that I think my brother would be proud of.

When Steve and I played varsity soccer together, back in high school, during the ’90s, he and I each had a varsity number. I would joke about mine being exactly twice as awesome as his, and he would joke that his represented his ‘zero-to-sixty’ speed, much more impressive than mine. When you see the title of my upcoming novel, look for those numbers and think of Stephen, the way that I often do.

He lives on in each of us when we do.

* * *

I originally sat down to right an announcement about the release of my first-ever, full-length novel. Instead, I wrote about a couple of Stephens. I don’t know if this would be much of a conclusion if I didn’t bring the two Stephen-statements together, so here goes.

Stephen King said that if you want to write well, you have to write a lot. And, his next novel, “Fairy Tale”, comes out on September 6th (go ahead and pre-order it like I did). As a nod to his influence on me as a reader and as a writer, I am formally announcing that my novel will come out on that same day, September 6th, via my publication partnership with Amazon.

My novel will feature, for the first time in a full-length story, the town of Bangor Springs. It’s as fictional –and real– as Derry, Maine is for Mr. King. If you’re a Stephen King fan, you should know where Derry, Maine is. When it comes to Bangor Springs, Michigan, the name is a bit of a nod to Mr. King.

On September 6th, my full-length novel, entitled “The Man in Room 204”, will be available for purchase, in hard-cover, paperback, and e-book formats. The title is a nod to the most important Stephen that I’ve ever known. As I live on, and write on, his bold courage is always with me.

I am excited to share this news with all of you, and I hope you’ll enjoy the read/ride.

Publishing News – July, 2022

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So, I’ve got a bit of an announcement to make.

Last week, I published my first book! It’s called “PROMPT CREATIONS (IN A PANDEMIC): A Collection of Thirty-One Ultra Short Stories“.

I made the move for a number of reasons. Primarily, I wanted to learn a bit about the process — I’m doing it through Amazon, for the time being — in preparation for my first novel coming later this year. I’ve learned a number of things, from how to buy an ISBN number, to how to register a copyright with the government. It’s been quite the growth experience.

The book that I decided to publish, as kind of a trial run, is a series of short stories that I wrote last winter, stories that came from my imagination and from a book of writing prompts. I like the collection of short stories, and I hope that you might like them as well.

To find the book, you can go to: amazon.com/author/philbrackett

The good news for you is, if you’re an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscriber, the book is free to you to download in its e-book format. If not, no worries. The e-book version of the book is $9.99. You can also order the print copy (paperback) of the book for $14.99 and it should arrive to you in a few days. Or, if you’d like to do things really ‘old-school’, you can reach out to me and I can sell you one of my copies (Amazon lets me order them at cost). If you choose this option, I could even be persuaded to autograph the copy for you =-)

I mentioned earlier in this post about my upcoming, full-length novel to be released later this year. I am working with my artist on the cover art design and touching up some final sections of the prose. The novel will be set in the fictional world of Bangor Springs, Michigan — a place that will seem familiar to the people who are closest to me (geographically). I am planning a series of these ‘Bangor Springs’ books to come out during my career, so stay tuned for more information on that.

Finally, and as I’ve always said, thanks for reading. Let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

Pinocchio

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It occurred to me today that we are all just wanting it to be.

So, I’ve had a bit of a love affair with a band that most of you have probably never heard of. They’ve never really been famous. I’m not sure that they’ve even ever had a hit on the top charts. But, back in the late 90s and early oughts, I was listening to them a lot. Something about their lyrics, the style of their music, and the vocal qualities of the lead singer just had me hooked.

The name of the band is Sister Hazel. To say that I’ve been having a love affair with them is probably an exaggeration. Truth be told, I only own two or three of their albums — according to some light research that I’ve completed just now on iTunes, they are up to nine or ten albums. However, I still listen to those couple of albums these days. I even went to see them live once — on the event of a friend of mine turning twenty-one, he and I went to see Sister Hazel in a bar in South Bend. I remember much about that evening, although the friendship hasn’t really stood the test of time, mostly because I turned out to be a less-than-faithful friend.

Bygones.

In any case, I should probably get to my point before I lose you entirely. This band, Sister Hazel, had two or three songs that really resonated with me lyrically, early on. One of them was a song called, “Wanted It To Be”. In it, the lead singer laments the end of a romantic relationship, describing the failings of the relationship in some detail, but moreover, just talking about how badly they’d wanted it to be.

I think that the reason for that song being musically important to me is the concept of wanting something to be. And the reality that wanting something to be doesn’t necessarily make it so.

* * *

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the movie “Pinocchio”. My reasons for thinking about this movie have been related to my writing, and the developments that are occurring in the world of my writing endeavors. I finished my first novel in May, after announcing in March that I was going to take a break from this blog in order to finish the novel. Since then, I had a few copies of the novel made, and I handed them off to people that I am trusting with the task of reading the novel and sharing their thoughts with me. I’ve already received one of the copies back –thanks are constantly due to my ever-loving wife– and I’ve started using the reader input to make the novel even better.

And the reason that this has anything to do with Pinocchio is related to my topic in the first section of this essay. Wanting something to be always results in either it not ending up being, or it ending up being. In “Pinocchio”, the toy puppet wants to be a real boy. And, as we all know, that’s how it ends up for him — ‘yay’ for happy endings. But, throughout the movie, it’s not as if Pinocchio is setting about, through a specific course of prescribed actions, to become a real boy. In the end, it’s determined that he is a worthy of becoming a real boy because of the characteristics that he possesses that would suggest that he’s been a real boy all along.

Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy, but he already was — in the ways that are most significantly important. And I’ve wanted to be a writer, to become one. But, what I’ve most recently discovered is that anyone who wants to be a writer has to be someone who writes. As backward as it might sound for me to describe to you the fact that I –in my mind– disconnected the idea of being a writer from the idea of being someone who writes, that’s the way that I thought about it for a very long time.

At the moment, I’m reminded of Yoda, telling Luke, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try’.”

* * *

Without getting into a philosophical or existential argument about being versus becoming, it’s occurred to me that wanting to be a writer isn’t enough. Wanting to become a writer isn’t even enough, although it’s most certainly closer to the truth of the matter inasmuch as it’s more likely to contain in it some action toward the goal.

At the end of the day, I’ve discovered that I’m a writer because I write. Because I seek to entertain by telling a story through written words. Because I have ideas for stories to tell that I capture in documents that I then share with other people. And, while there are other, more grandiose definitions of the word “writer”, those definitions are just the result of the splitting of hairs that we all do. The question of whether Pinocchio was a real boy had more to do with Pinocchio’s belief that he wasn’t a real boy than it did with any objective observations of his reality. In reality, the puppet was a real boy in the same way that something which walks like a duck and talks like a duck is most likely a duck.

Will I ever be a famous writer? Who knows? Will I ever accomplish the dream of being able to walk into a Barnes & Noble and pull a copy of my book off of a shelf? I can’t rightly say. Will the New York Times Best Seller List ever feature my name? I won’t conjecture. But, in the interests of drawing a line in the sand for myself, let me say this:

I am now a writer, something I’ve always wanted to be. Just call me Pinocchio.

 

 

I’ve Been Hiding Here

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It occurred to me today that it’s time for me to stop hiding.

I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer over the past ten months. I’ve learned that I’m capable. I’ve learned that I have strengths and weaknesses. I’ve learned that, depending on what I’m writing, some people even like to read what I’m writing. I’ve discovered a joy for doing this thing, and it is burning brighter inside of me than it ever has.

But, there’s a problem.

I think my development has me leaving this place.

* * *

I don’t know if I’ve ever written about hermit crabs before — something in my memory banks says that I have, but I can’t remember where or when. The thing about a hermit crab is that it grows. As it grows, it moves in to and out of different shells of different sizes. Its first shell –also its smallest– is the shell that it outgrows first. Then, it moves into a larger shell when it can’t fit any longer into the shell that it’s been living in.

Along the same lines, I’d be a fool to try to fit into the shoes that I wore in the third grade.

Or, my family of five –with three teenagers– would end up murdering each other if we tried to fit into the eight-hundred-square-foot house that my wife and I first purchased those many years ago.

You get the picture. What used to fit us doesn’t fit us anymore because we grow.

Of course, this process should be celebrated, right? But I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t get frustrated every time I had to buy a new pair of shoes for a child of mine when the last pair of shoes had barely even been worn. Rather than celebrating their growth and development, I got frustrated at the price of rearing children these days.

And, don’t even get me started on how I feel about them someday being capable of independent living. Oy!

Because living things grow, adjustments have to be made to accommodate that growth. But, those adaptations take us out of what we’ve become comfortable with doing, and then we get frustrated with having to change, as opposed to being joyous over the natural order of human development. We’ve got our emotional response on backward, simply because we overvalue our convenience levels.

* * *

Take this blog, for example. I’ve been working at it for a solid ten months, and it has been a great experience. But, I think it’s one of those things that I’m holding on to, and since my hands are full with it, they can’t be full with anything else.

I’ve been bringing my work, my finished products, to you for a while now. You’ve looked them over, and you’ve said what you’ve had to say about them. But each of these has just been a little thing. I work for a little bit to be able to show you a little thing, and you think what you think about that little thing
–and so do I– but they just amount to a pile of little things.

I want to make a big thing.

I’m afraid of the big thing. I’m afraid that I can’t do it, even though doing these little things hasn’t been a problem. I’m afraid that I don’t know how to do it. I’m afraid that no one is going to like the big thing, when it’s done, like they’ve enjoyed some of these little things.

Big things are hard. Little things are easy, and once you know that you can do them, they give you a sense of accomplishment, and a satisfaction, and a boost to the ol’ ego, but only for a while. And, they are still just little things. Once you grow to discover that you are capable of the little things, they don’t really impress you that much when you do them, and so you pursue a greater goal.

When was the last time that you were impressed by your ability to tie your own shoes?

So, I am going to go away for a while. I am going to unshackle myself from this blog and its schedule. I have something bigger that I am going to go away to work on. This won’t be my last post on this blog, but it will be my last regular post, at least for now. In the future, at some point, I’ll post something on here again, when I feel like I have something that needs to be said. You will be able to check back here –whenever you’d like– to see about my latest thoughts.

IOTMT.org

It’s time for this hermit crab to find a new shell to move into. This one has gotten to be a bit constricting.

If this change upsets you or irritates you, at least know that it’s not about you
— it’s about me. I need something more than this. Trust me, I’m afraid to be doing it. I’d love nothing more than to continue popping out these little things for you, but I’m growing tired of being a purveyor of little things. And, if I’m being 100% honest, I’ve been hiding here. No more hiding.

Thanks to those of you who have been regularly reading my writing. It really means more than I can express to you. To know that there have been people who are interested to read what I’m writing has given this bird the wings that it’s going to use to fly away, for now. If you’ve missed a few of my posts, here and there, they’re all still available in the blog. Catch up on what you’ve missed while I duck out and work on the big thing.

TTFN.

You Don’t Have What You Don’t Have

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It occurred to me today that we must all sound like a bunch of bumbling idiots.

I was working in one of the buildings in my school district the other day, fixing a problem that needed to be fixed, when I heard a person complaining about the financial situation in our school district and how bad they believe it to be. Now, mind you, this person also happens to be one of the most gravely irresponsible printers in our entire school district. This person is responsible, single-handedly, for killing entire trees worth of paper THIS YEAR ALONE.

Which got me to thinking.

How often is it the case that we wish we had something that we used to have? How often is it the case that we wish we had something that we might still have, even now, were it not for the fact that we suck at managing our resources? How often is it the case that a group of people –lacking in resources– is lacking in such a way because of the wasteful behavior of others in that same organization?

How often does our complaining just sound like hypocritical whining to the people who know us the best?

So, let’s get started.

* * *

Sometimes, I feel like –at my house– it’s feast or famine. When the ship comes in, and everything is coming up roses, I can’t help but have a smile on my face. But, when we’re struggling to get from day to day, and it seems like it’s one hit after another after another, it’s just so hard to get up off the mat one more time.

Why is it that I got my family’s tax return back a couple of days ago and I feel like it’s burning a whole in my pocket? At how many points, between now and next year –around this time– when I get my next tax return back, will I feel like, “Man, I wish I still had some of that tax return money laying around?”

Now, don’t get me wrong, my family and I are doing just fine. We are blessed beyond measure, and I have never had any real reason to complain, for all of the joys that have been placed in my life. I’ve got three beautiful children and an amazing wife. My parents love me and support me. I live in a wonderful town, and I have an amazing job that I enjoy. But this post isn’t about all that.

Rather, what puts in the position, down the road, where we end up in situations, wishing that we had what we used to have? They say that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I just can’t believe that we’re all so stupid, that we can’t plan for a future when we are going to need to be able to use what we have in our possession in this moment, down the road.

It’s like when I throw out the pile of parts at work, the pile of parts that I’ve been holding onto for years, convinced that someone is going to want/need those one day. Then someone comes by –two days later– and asks for the parts that I threw out. All that time and no one wanted them, so I got rid of them, and now there’s an inkling of interest.

SMH!

Or, are we just so blind that we can’t see the pattern repeating itself, over and over again.

* * *

Time is the worst one, isn’t it? Don’t you wish you had some of that time back? Where did it go?

Of all of the things that we wish that we had, things that we don’t have anymore, time is probably more commonly lamented than money, don’t you think?

I catch myself doing this in my own life and it irks me that I could be so annoyingly fickle. I catch my own children doing it, too, and I know that they do it because they watched me doing it and now the poison spreads.

WE NEED TO STOP WASTING TIME.

This issue of wasting time, while I’ve made some comparisons between it and the myriad different ways that we waste money in our world, might seem to be similar, but it occurs to me that at least one significant difference exists. There aren’t nearly as many effective ways for banking time as there are for banking money.

What are you doing with your time? Good things? Productive things? Are you getting some relaxation in there? Time with your loved ones? Do you imagine that you are using your time well?

Do you ever finding yourself wishing that you had more time?

Ladies and gentlemen, you can’t fill a tire with a hole in it. Can’t be done. If your attempts at doing this look something like: I’ll waste less time playing video games so I’ll have more time to spend with my kids, but then your Facebook time doubles in size, then you’re trying to fill a tire with a hole in it, or rather, your tire has multiple holes in it, and patching one of those holes isn’t going to do a darn thing about the other holes.

* * *

A coworker of mine shared with me a quote from Elisabeth Elliot today. If you’ve never heard of Elisabeth Elliot, she’s a published author (wish I could say that) who also happens to have quite the story to tell, pertinent to this topic of discussion. Mrs. Elliot’s husband was a missionary to Ecuador. During his attempts to reach a certain tribe of people, they murdered him.

So, what did Mrs. Elliot do?

She continued her husband’s work, spending time reaching out to the very individuals responsible for her husband’s death.

The quote that this coworker gave to me to read discussed the daily choices that we make to count blessings or count burdens, and how that daily practice becomes a pattern in our lives. I certainly think that, often times, people complain when they just don’t have the force of will to think of something better to say.

But, what impresses me even further about Elisabeth Elliot was that she certainly didn’t seem to be the kind of person to waste something in the hear-and-now, only to end up wanting it somewhere down the road. I can’t imagine that I would have been strong enough to be able to do what she did in the face of her husband’s sudden death.

And, while I can’t live her life, I can live mine.

And you should live yours.

So, see if you can’t stop wasting what it is that you’ve been given. Try doing something better with it.

Is This Real?

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It occurred to me today that we get disconnected as we get connected.

I was just sitting across the table from my son, as the two of us were eating breakfast. My son was scrolling on his phone, through all of the posts that he follows, on all of the different social media platforms that he uses. He would occasionally show me something that he thought was funny or cool, and I was just enjoying being around him.

At one point, he found something online –presumably something that he found somewhat dubious– and he said out loud, to no one in particular,

“Is this real?”

And then he was off, searching for some other piece of corroboration to confirm what he was seeing. The moment was there, and then it was gone. As it passed, I thought to myself, “I know of nothing more real than this.”

Of course, his question wasn’t aimed at what I was paying attention to. Because I was enjoying us. I was enjoy the connectivity of being in that moment –that series of moments– with my son, interacting (even if the interactions were somewhat technology-laden).

The problem is, for so many of us, so much of the time, we forget what’s real. Or we become confused by what is not.

* * *

We receive more information, in the twenty-first century, in a matter of an hour than previous generations were processing in a matter of days. Information comes at us from all directions — it’s everywhere. Because of this massive influx of data, we are forced into practices for dealing with that tidal wave that influence what we end up believing and how we perceive the world around us.

Sometimes, those practices are not good practices.

Take social media, for example. If you’ve been living on the dark side of the moon, perhaps you’ve missed the role that social media has been playing in modern society over the past few years. In the past twelve months, social media has played a significant role in the dissemination of information about the pandemic, about the dangerous political climate in the nation, just to name a couple of issues. But, this isn’t were the problem started, necessarily.

The information age that we find ourselves in has been made possible, in no small part, thanks to the invent of the internet. Via this tool, information is not only readily available for us to peruse, but it has been engineered to get ‘pushed’ at us, so that it isn’t any longer a choice, for many of us, whether or not we are consuming information. These days, we are being force-fed information. While it’s certainly one thing for me to be able to pull up the internet to find out when the Dolphins are playing this afternoon, it’s entirely another thing for my phone to send my a notification that Wal-Mart is having a sale on bananas. But, if you don’t know how to disable notifications on your smart phone –in an attempt to quiet the noise– I’d bet a pretty penny that you’re not alone.

But, this isn’t were the problem started, necessarily.

We’ve been processing significant amounts of information –more and more significant– for about the last century or so. Blame the television, blame the radio, blame the advertising and marketing machines at work in our society, blame whomever you’d like. But, we got here, not by signing a waiver that stated that we were all okay with being inundated with massive amounts of data, but rather by taking small steps in this direction over time. If you, at any point in your life, have thought to yourself –when it comes to the topic of information inundation– “Stop this train, I want to get off.”, I’d bet a pretty penny that you’re not alone.

Since we are all, to greater or lesser extents, overwhelmed by information, the question then becomes “What are we going to do about it?” or “How is this detrimental?” or “What can I do to be sure that I am bearing up well under the overload?”

There are a few answers. My son, sitting at the table this morning, illustrated one of them to me.

Learning how to corroborate information is now a critical skill. I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news lately, but it seems like there are new examples of the detrimental effects of failures to corroborate information popping up every hour or two. While I suspect that we could all stand to have a little bit of training on this, and while I also suspect that there are people who are going to be better at it than others, I am also afraid of this truth:

I think there are people who don’t want to know that they’re being lied to, primarily because the lies sound better than the truth.

* * *

My family is a family of five, if you didn’t know — my wife, my twin daughters, my son, and me. And, since we are all pretty tech-savvy people, we end up having a house full of devices. Between smartphones, computers of different sizes and shapes, video game systems, and televisions in different places, there are so many options for all of us to be connected to something in the building that is our home.

As a result, we often end up disconnected from each other.

But we understand that it’s an issue, and we try to do things to combat the problem, to take time to be connected with each other, but we also –each of us– enjoy being connected to the information that we like.

Now, pan the camera out a little bit and look at a bigger section of things. If my family, a group of people who spend a lot of time with each other as necessitated by our living arrangement, have a hard time connecting with each other, then how can we, as communities and neighborhoods, as towns and cities and villages, not be suffering from a lack of connection among us all?

I have a neighbor, for example, whose home is close enough to mine that I could hit it with a rock thrown from my driveway. This neighbor and I have interacted –in person– once or twice in the last month. But, via social media, I pretend some level of connection because I know what they are choosing to post about online, and they know what we are choosing to post about online.

Is that connected? Some would say ‘yes’. I would probably say ‘no’. Maybe the more pertinent question to ask is:

Is that a real connection?

Am I really connected to two dozen of the people from my high school graduating class? Am I really connected to my aunts and uncles and cousins? Am I really connected to that girl I dated in middle school, to those guys I palled around with in college, to those former coworkers from my former place of employment?

Do I really have 671 friends?

Really?

* * *

If I had a dollar for each time I’d scratched my head in the last twelve months and thought to myself, “Really?”, I wouldn’t need to ask whether or not my stimulus check has been deposited yet, that’s for sure.

Have you recently done the same thing? You saw something or you heard something or you read something, and you thought, “Really?”

The question of what’s real in our world seems to have, at some point in the recent past, gotten more difficult to answer, at least it has for me.

I think I need to get back to relationships, and not the ones that I pretend to have on a social media platform, either. If there is anything that’s real, I suspect that relationships still are.

So, drop your phone. Disconnect from your current streaming binge. Close your internet browser and put the laptop to sleep.

Find someone, close by, and connect to them.