Out of the Nineties: In which I go two-fer two-fer

As my collegiate track career wound down, the faculty head of the English Department asked me if I’d like to be a Graduate Assistant. I told him I wasn’t a graduate. He said he knew, but I could start my Master of Arts degree in my last semester and be done by the end of 1998. I asked if my friend Tony, a gay philosophy student, could do it as well. “He already is,” he replied, “And he recommended I ask you.” And for the second time, I was the second half of a 2-for-1 deal for Murray State.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I go off on a tangent

By my senior year of college I was a consistently barely-above-average middle distance runner that my coach always said could be a much, much better runner than I was. I took this as a compliment. For some reason, I decided I wanted to be on the 1600-meter relay team even though I was no longer a sprinter. I inserted myself into the sprinters’ workouts, beating every one of them in practice until one of them threw me against a wall mid-stride and another threatened to kill my white ass, but the sprint coach had no choice but to concede and put me on the relay. My performance at my own event suffered as I single-mindedly focused on an event for which I was ill-suited on a relay team that didn't want me. I think now I did this because every time I called Wayne Martin to tell him how I was running he would say, “That’s great! Did you hear about Brian?” My half brother Brian had gone on to become a state champion at Lawrence High and an All-American at the University of Kansas. His race was the 400, and he anchored the university’s 1600-meter relay team.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which the big boys move in

Whenever I went back to Lawrence through much of the Nineties I volunteered at Adventure Bookstore on Massachusetts Street. Perhaps I did this out of guilt for shoplifting so many books there in the Eighties. They paid me in books, so I like to think I was just going legit with them, the same way Wayne Martin moved from selling drugs to selling discount furniture. The ends might have been the same—I still got my books, Wayne Martin still got people to pay him for things they didn’t necessarily want—but at least we were both now operating above-board. My volunteer work and Wayne Martin’s prime downtown location came tumbling down in one fell swoop when Borders came to town. They bought the entire block of New Hampshire Street that the Kansas Furniture Factory Outlet shared with other local businesses, and Wayne Martin moved his business further away from downtown and closer to the railroad tracks. Then the whole block was razed and Borders opened in November of 1996, at the advent of the Christmas selling season when independent booksellers typically make at least half their yearly profits and get out of the red for the year. Adventure and three other downtown bookstores closed by the spring.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I plot

When I was in Kentucky, my first time to live away from my home in Kansas, I began creating a timeline. I plugged into this timeline every memory, every event in my life, in chronological order by year, month, and if possible even the day. This was my first literary framing device, giving my life a sense of linearity and narrative progression.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Layout Update Idea

Today, after reading Amy Butcher's wonderful recent piece on Gawker, I noticed an interesting background photo on her Facebook page: a screenshot she'd taken after Googling "Why are writers" and letting autofill work its magic. Some of the finishes included "so pretentious," "depressed," "crazy," "weird," "important," and "lonely."

This inspired a two-hour timesuck during my office hours today, wherein I typed "why are ________" into Google just to see how it autofilled the rest. The autofills for actors, politicians, corporations, and singers offered some elucidating glimpses into our collective psyche, but my early favorite was unicorns (some autofills included "healthier than dragons," "hollow," "so awesome," "real," and "mentioned in the bible"). Go ahead, try it - it's addicting!

A by-product of my time-wasting was the idea for a new banner, which you see below, which I'm still figuring how to integrate into the site. I think most of it describes me pretty well.

Out of the Nineties: In which shit happens

During my first year at Murray State, our equipment manager hung himself in the equipment room, deep in the sweaty bowels of the football stadium. One of the trainers found him in the morning, naked with a beet-red penis. Later that year I became friends with a cheerleader who was in two of my English classes. She was the only cheerleader I’ve ever been friends with. Right before Spring Break, she left a scribbled note in my locker saying, “Help! Daughaday’s class is kicking my butt!” Over Spring Break, on the way to the national cheerleading competition, the left rear tire on the team van blew out. The van flipped five to seven times, throwing half the team and rolling over my cheerleading friend’s head. I’ve come to think that these deaths are thematically related, but I still haven’t figured out how.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which experience becomes history

Throughout and after college, I read record guides cover to cover. Allmusic, Rolling Stone, but especially Trouser Press—I memorized all the people and bands I’d spent those nights with at the Bottleneck and the Outhouse. I had to know every name, all of them.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I am like you, and you, and you

In my post-Christian college days, I frequently drank shots of Everclear and Coke until I woke up with sore cheeks and gums. I got a wing tattooed on my ankle by a guy next to his motorcycle on Spring Break in Daytona. I ran out of money halfway through more than one semester, and had to eat ramen and work midnight shift cleaning the student union. I read a lot. I got in debt that I’m still paying off.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I cut the cord

I walked, ran, or rode a bike through my first two years of college. The only car I owned was an ’85 Buick Skylark I bought the summer of my junior year for $1,500 on a payment plan from Greg Proctor. It served as both a means of flight and a last shackle around my ankle. On my first road trip from Murray to Louisville I found that the car was a lemon, leaking both coolant and brake fluid, needing new wiring, and costing me more in repairs than I made that summer at my job as a camp counselor. Soon I began deliberately missing payments. He sent me letters threatening to sue. Wayne Martin offered to pay him for the car, but Greg Proctor wouldn’t accept payment from him. I drove the car back to Kansas at the end of the summer, and didn’t own a car again until the end of the Nineties.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I go south, again (this time for real)

After switching from sprinting to middle distance and improving consistently until I was a solidly mediocre runner, I rode the coattails of my best friend, another distance runner at my junior college, into a shared full-ride athletic scholarship at Murray State University in southwest Kentucky. To this day, when I tell people where I went to college they mention the basketball team, then ask, “So who was Murray anyway?” (It’s named after the town it’s in.)

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which we attain power through organizing

My mother remarried when I was in college. When she moved in with her new husband, I had to sort through and consolidate what was left of my childhood in her basement. The item I excavated that I cherished most, whose attached memories were most pure, was a huge chest of Transformers from the Eighties, most of which I’d shoplifted. I found that of the toy robots I’d kept, the ones I loved most were the subsets that combined Voltron-like into one master robot. Constructicons, Protectobots, Predacons, Aerialbots, Stunticons, Technobots, Combaticons, Terrorcons—every set of five to six individual pieces, each with its own self-contained personality and story, combined to attain a power and complexity none of the individual parts could attain on their own. These were the only pieces of my childhood I kept.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Out of the Nineties: In which I nod to Bob

When I tell people now that I was once an evangelical Christian, most don’t believe it. Many times I tell them it’s a phase every kid in Kansas goes through, and remind them that this was the state that twice elected a school board that forced teachers to teach creationism alongside evolution in science class. I like to say that the more I learned, the less blind faith I placed in fundamentalist Christian doctrine. This is only true to a point—the full truth is that I simply supplanted my mythologies, mostly through the music I listened to. I segued out of CCM into the music it was aping—heartland rock like Bruce and U2, “spiritually conscious” hip-hop like PM Dawn and Arrested Development, loopy power pop like the Breeders and Throwing Muses. But mostly, I listened to Dylan. I started with his late-70s Christian phase, then plunged right into his ’62-’69 heyday. What I loved most about him wasn’t his nasally voice, but the persona he created. Robert Zimmerman left his Midwestern home, moved to New York City, absorbed the world of American folk and pop culture, and remade himself as Bob Dylan. And everyone believed him.

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Out of the Nineties: In which the lens wanders

In the fall of my sophomore year in college, I took a photography class to fulfill a gen ed requirement. I photographed fenceposts, country roads, and coeds, but my professor never gave me above a C. He said I lacked focus, and had a tendency to lose the subject in the background.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

Big month so far!

Wow, so many developments over this past month! I figured I'd take the day off from updates to The List and the Story to give said developments in list form:

•  Patrick Madden wrote a wonderful little review of The List and the Story on Brevity this week - you can read it here, and I also added it to Further Reading.
  
• Superstition Review released a podcast of me reading my piece "The Revelator," and I also wrote a guest blog post in conjunction with its release about The List and the Story, which I also added to Further Reading.
• I also got some nice side traffic from my caps lock rant on dog-on-girl sex fiends misunderstanding my post "The Dog Who Made the Little Girl Cry on the F Train," which was retweeted frequently after my friend Kris Jansma commented on it. 

OK, all for now. Tomorrow, back to the Nineties!

Out of the Nineties: In which I fall in

For my first two years of college, my sole social connections were members of the track and cross country teams. My first girlfriend, a devout Christian dairy farmer, was the star distance runner my freshman year. She broke up with me right before the end of the school year, writing me a letter saying she just couldn’t foresee being married to me. My second girlfriend beat out my first girlfriend as the number one runner on the team, then dropped out of school when her other boyfriend picked her up and took her back to Oklahoma City.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I channel Woody Guthrie

In total, I lived in 17 different apartments and dorm rooms in the Nineties. One roommate, in 1997, postulated a connection between this and the fact that I went to seven different schools in the Eighties. She told me I had no home.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I weigh my options

Hope is always strongest when plans are weakest. I knew, having survived childhood and high school, I was destined for something great. So the summer of my graduation, I enrolled at a private Mennonite college in southeastern Kansas. Then I enlisted with the Marines. And I started working at the plastic factory. I had options. When the registrar at the Mennonite college called me and asked how I was going to pay my outstanding balance of $12,000 before registering, I hung up. When I found out that the other recruits cussed and had sex and weren’t terribly impressed with my religious sensibility or my ability to run faster than them, I stopped answering my Staff Sergeant’s calls. And after 27 straight nights of the midnight shift sorting Cool Whip containers and sippy cups, I called my cousin Monica to ask her about the community college she’d attended before becoming a dental assistant. I enrolled at Highland Community College three days after classes had started, and begged the coach there to let me run for the track team.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I stumble into something, and duck

After meeting Wayne Martin I also discovered my half brothers, who also went to my high school. Both of them were gifted athletically—one was a star player on the junior varsity football team as a freshman, and the other was already winning varsity track races as a sophomore. By then I’d solidified my reputation as one of the top five worst players ever to attempt the game of football at Lawrence High School. But three months before I was to graduate the track coach heard I was related to a great runner, and he made me run once around the track as fast as I could. I ran it in 55 seconds, which would make me a solid backup on the 1600-meter relay team. So I joined the track team, and I won my first race. The rest of the team was as astonished as I was, especially when I ducked to avoid the tape at the finish line.

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Out of the Nineties: In which I work well alone

My second job was at the local publisher Allen Press, cleaning the bathrooms. My favorite part of this job was the weekends, when they were closed and I could steal books from the stock shelves and mailroom in the basement. In that basement I first read Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with his illustrations. I swiped it thinking it was a religious tract, similar to the Chick Publications pamphlets I collected. Reading the Proverbs of Hell in that dim, solitary basement, with the pigeons in the ventilation shafts piping like siphons of Hades, terrified me more than watching the world end on The Day After in grade school, and for far different reasons. The seeds of doubt—in my goodness, in my salvation, in the benevolence of the world—were sown in the underworld of Allen Press.

Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties

My latest caps lock rant, into cyberspace

YOU, MOTHERFUCKERS, HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD MY INTENT IN WRITING THE BLOG POST "THE DOG WHO MADE THE LITTLE GIRL CRY ON THE F TRAIN." WHILE I LIKE TO SEE A SPIKE IN MY HIT COUNT AS MUCH AS THE NEXT WRITER, IT DISTURBS ME, AND BREAKS MY HEART FOR YOU, TO SEE HOW MANY OF YOU GOT TO THAT POST BY GOOGLING SOME VARIANT OF "DOG F**** LITTLE GIRL." I MEAN, YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAD YOUR FLY UNZIPPED WHEN YOU STUMBLED UPON AN INSTANCE OF GENUINE EMPATHY I OBSERVED IN THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY. THERE IS NO DOG-ON-GIRL SEX, AND IT REALLY CREEPS ME OUT TO THINK SO MANY OF YOU PERVS ARE READING IT WITH THAT INTENT. HOPEFULLY YOU STOPPED READING A SENTENCE OR TWO IN, AND FOUND SOMETHING MORE SUITABLE TO YOUR MASTURBATORY NEEDS. LORD KNOWS THERE'S ENOUGH OF THAT STUFF ONLINE.