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Forgotten Friday: Sister, Single

March 27, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

She’s incredible, as far as sisters go. Sure, she used to beat me mercilessly until I was old enough to fight back, and then continued to psychologically torment my teenage years in that special way only an older sibling can. But our spats, never truly serious, built a foundation for mutual respect as adults, taught us each other’s strengths and weaknesses, gave us insight into each other very few can ever match. Becca is my sister, and yet, on another level, she is me, and I am her.

Excitement buzzes around the nuptials like worker bees returning to the hive, spindly legs covered in potential future sweetness. The stress of months of planning fades, leaving behind a warm, heavy blanket of exhausted joy. My own wedding felt like a drop of water on a hot skillet; beautiful to watch dance and sizzle with frenetic exuberance, but gone much too fast. A few hours on a single day doesn’t seem to do justice to the proverbial ascension into a combined tomorrow, but it’s all we’ve got, so it’s what we do.

A sibling wields a unique kind of love; one born from a nearly identical shared experience. A companion to all those stories lost behind closed suburban doors, a peer like no friend or fiance can be, if only by virtue of the length of the relationship. Not even a very close parent can understand the generational, cultural, and emotional ties that tether brother and sister. Your sibling knows you at your very best and very worst; the haven of your home where you hid your fears and hollered you successes was theirs too, after all.

The wedding will be wonderful. I have no doubts. But a part of me selfishly mourns. A week from tomorrow, the last bastion of the life I knew as a child will be gone.

The house we grew up in was sold years ago, and I can’t bring myself to pull it up on Google Maps, never mind actually drive by it. My cleats have long been hung up as soccer made way for computers and paychecks. My father’s strong hands and voice no longer fill my days with mentoring and humor. All the pieces of youthful vim I cobbled together into the collective tale of my upbringing have melded into the flat pages of the family’s history book, save for my sister, and those tangible, living memories that still swirl around her.

Becca is finally happy, after a long stint of what one could argue was decided unhappiness. Ian’s a good dude, and their future is more than bright. Marriage is what we expect anyway, right? That step that solidifies romantic success, forever friendship, societal acceptance as a lovingly legitimate couple? It’s a major milestone into adulthood, one undertaken by serious adults seriously planning the rest of their lives. Children don’t get married; they shoo it away with cootie-laden ews. To be married is to be mature, or at the very least, brave enough to peek tentatively into the future while holding someone’s hand.

When I walk her down that aisle playing impromptu patriarch, I’m walking us both down an inevitable, unchangeable path. When she says “I, do” the echo will resonate through all our lives, signaling the beginning of an era when we’re all finally free from the fetters of nostalgia, free to appreciate and acknowledge the source while actively moving towards the destination. My dad’s motto was, “never look back,” and now, on the verge of having the freedom to relish in all the possibility wrapped and bundled in each tomorrow, I realize that his words didn’t mean “never remember” but instead “never dwell.”

I mourn, because that’s what you do when you lose something. But the death of one thing often means the birth of another, so my mourning is tempered by the celebration that my sister, the female embodiment of Gray, flowers anew, in a garden of her own tender creation.

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

A week from tomorrow, I can finally let the ghosts of the last thirty years rest, while the spirits of the next sixty come out to play.

Coverage of the 2014 Body vs. Brain Match

June 20, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Only twenty eight minutes in, the game remains a 2-2 tie. My body came out strong from the starting whistle, showing natural talent and jeux de balle, dominating the first 15 minutes with little resistance from my brain’s defensive backs. My brain, despite glowing scouting reports and promising qualifying matches, failed to live up to expectations, and arrived to the game seemingly unmotivated. Taking advantage, my legs slipped one past the keeper (I warned my brain not to put the Parietal lobe in the net) around the 10th minute.

Relentless on the attack, my body scored another goal in the 16th minute; an outward curling rocket backed by energy and youth, launched perfectly from just outside the eighteen yard box. It looked, for a moment, given the weak play and lack of enthusiasm (and a .5 GPA one year in high school), that my brain would concede even more. At 2-0, my brain looked outclassed; defeated before the game had even really begun.

But life, like the beautiful game, remains ever unpredictable. My body’s lead striker and goal scorer (my right leg) went down with a career ending injury in only the 17th minute of play. His future had been all but determined – national tournaments and college scholarships – but a broken tibia saw him carried off on an orange gurney by worried medical staff, and gave my brain a fighting chance to turn the game around.

By the 20th minute my brain had regained composure, and stopped the constant pressure on their net. Without my right leg to support it, my left leg stood in the middle of the field awkwardly, unable to do much for the team. My arms and torso were nearly as ineffective, but did manage to defend without giving away too many reckless free kicks. It didn’t take long for my brain to ruin my body’s clean sheet; a sweeping cross from my Cerebellum to the awaiting head of some college applications set the crowd roaring. A silly mistake from my left elbow in the 24th minute left the net wide open for photography and beer, who with a quick give-and-go around a clearly fatigued left ankle, tied the game.

Now it’s a stalemate, neither side taking chances to commit and push players forward to score, concerned about the break-away counter attack, and being vulnerable on defense. My body hasn’t given up, but the loss of their best player clearly demoralized them, and their attacks have been less frequent and less intense over the past 5 minutes. My brain, conversely, has grown bolder and has done well to control the midfield, as the young attacking center mid, writing, has rallied his team with some inspiring dedication and hard work.

It’s unclear how this half will end, but all the momentum has shifted, with my brain boasting more than 65% possession of the ball. I can’t count my body out yet as he’s proven himself strong and resilient in the past, but if the brain keeps up this kind of clever, efficient gameplay, I worry that we’ll soon see the scoreboard much heavier on their side.

Stay tuned for more coverage of this riveting match up.

For match highlights, see:

Forgotten Friday: Corporate America, circa 1978

May 30, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

What images does your mind conjure when you hear the term, “corporate park?”

Do your thoughts jump to soulless financial machines: adult Lego bricks available only in greys and browns, photocopies of similar buildings plopped down into populated parking lots, unblinking logos like electric gargoyles perched on feckless facades?

Or do you imagine an actual “park,” a living, thriving, gathering place for a community of professionals, a bustling ecosystem of admins and executives sharing lunches and lessons on a Tuesday afternoon?

I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit sawing at the invisible fetters of McLean, Virginia, and I recognize the suit and tie mentality permeating every porous inch of the concrete towers that rise like well manicured mausoleums from the DC Metro marshlands. I’m fortunate to not have to spend all my waking hours walking that tech corridor, but I’m still a denizen of a different corporate park, one whose history I’m fascinated by, and have written about before.

I fear I’ve developed an unhealthy cathexis for Corporate and Garden City drives, come to know their presiding dryads well as I’ve built the base of my career. The “park” borders I-495 (the infamous DC Beltway), its air polluted by the sounds and smog of seven hundred and fifity thousand daily commuters, but signs of nature remain. Freshly gnawed trees betray a local group of beavers; fat, ornery Canadian geese turn the little creek into a personal nesting ground every Spring; honey suckles and several other wildflowers sneak to bloom between discarded trash from Metro riders moving from train to office.

It’s here I run, usually after work, usually in warm weather twilight. Doing some quick writer-math, I’ve run approximately 1500 miles in Sisyphean circles around this place over 6 years, giving me ample time get to know it.

And yet, it still surprises me.

On days I’m feeling particularly energetic, I’ll stop to do pull-ups on a set of bars just east of the Metro station. There is a sign there, worn white print on aging blue fiberglass, surrounded by algae stained splintering wood that I’ve noticed many times, but never really paid attention to:

The sign was planted here by the Southwood Corporation, a group that since the 1970s has made giant, custom signs for locations just like corporate parks. Fit-Trail creates an outdoor gym, where any person can move between stations, getting a full-body work out by following the nifty directions on the strategically oriented placards. Or so goes the theory.

I’ve never seen anyone else use the bars to do chin-ups, and have never seen anyone tempt fate by rubbing their back against old, weathered wood to do an isometric squat. Despite my hours pounding the local concrete, I’d never noticed another flash white and blue, anywhere. But this station is 21 and 22 of some indeterminable number; there have to be others, elsewhere, right? At least 10 more with two exercises each, and at least one more down the line, since the instructions on this one say: “Pace to next station: Jog.”

So I jogged. And jogged. And jogged. Heaved and sweated and walked after giving into my asthma. Put my hands on my knees and cursed the Eastern shore humidity. I went around the whole 1.3 mile loop two more times in my search, but didn’t see any other signs. I’d lost the Fit-Trail before I even got a chance to find it.

Returning to the chin-up bars, I was determined to learn more. Upon closer inspection, I found a date that explained a lot:

1978. The year Southwood launched the Fit-Trail line (they’re still making them today for children’s parks and retirement communities), meaning this random corporate park in the middle of Maryland had been one of their first customers. Other than the brief terror of realizing I’d been doing pretty rigorous pull-ups on a thirty six year old metal bar and wooden frame, I felt sort of sad. This piece of signage was older than me, the only reminder that its brethren had ever been here to begin with, the last bastion of a time when this corporate park was more than just a shell for contract vehicles and short-term tenants.

The New Carrollton Metro station also opened in ’78 (not a half mile from Corporate drive), and I imagine some real estate developer spending top dollar to create a vibrant place to work at the then-new (and still) end to the Orange line. An all inclusive vocational vacation with restaurants and social draws and accouterments to made working seem as unlike work as possible.

As I run on the decades old sidewalks, I picture a different, distant version of Corporate drive, one where beautiful afternoon sun showers brought people out of offices regardless of deadlines, one where many people ran this trail to stay in shape, moving from each station to the next, past coworkers who were chatting away about that new movie, Grease, or the crazy situation in Love Canal, New York. I step back into a place come to life with employees who cared and a community that teemed, thirty years before the whole place grew thick with trash and unkempt overgrowth.

But that version, if it ever existed, is gone. Replaced by nothing and instead trimmed down, personality faded and weathered by time. A few echoes do remain, tucked behind the buildings, but with no one to use or maintain them, they’ve lost their luster and appeal.

If history is a cycle, the moves by Google and other progressive companies to create corporate environments where people actually want to go to work might be a full 360 spin of the wheel, returning us to sometime near 1978. I’m too young to know what it was like then, but if these few dwindling symbols are even sort of representative, it’s a time I’d like to experience again, for the first time.

Volleyball, circa 1978.

Forgotten Friday: My Sherry Amour

January 24, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

There are few things that simultaneously sting and soothe as much as sorting through the assorted material detritus of someone’s life. All the papers, the scribbles, the notes left hanging in the pulpy ether, inken echoes of a person’s voice on every leaf. Even the things that don’t bare their literal mark carry grainy nostalgic gravitas, reminders of how that person drove down the highways of time, what prosaic hour-fillers caused a traffic jam of commitment and desire in those relatively few moments we’re blessed with consciousness.

I was helping my mom with some simple jobs at her house, changing a light bulb here, replacing a battery there, organizing her transition into fiduciary executorship even farther over there. After I’d gotten the smoke detectors to screech their new battery announcement through the whole house, she asked if I’d take a look at a box in the garage. A box filled with wine.

I expected to find some store-bought merlots and cabernets, maybe some of the proverbial “good stuff” that my dad had hoarded away as an apocalyptic just-in-case. She pointed me to the decaying ruins of a red and white cardboard cube with eight emerald bottles sticking out like prairie dogs viewing the plain from the safety of their holey home. The bottles looked familiar, but distant, that friend from elementary school whose face changed just enough from the evolution out of childhood and into adulthood that you only recognize them after a few minutes of guarded, remote study. I knew these bottles at one time, maybe even filled them and corked them, but couldn’t triangulate when, or why, or how.

They were unlabeled (the hallmark of Gray family breweries), covered in silky webs and solid dust, and gave no hint of their contents. My dad had been as eccentric in his brewing as he had in the rest of his life: there was equal chance this was carrot wine, rhubarb wine, banana wine, or possibly even sour apple.

The only way to find out was to pierce the cork with silver spiral.

As the soft cylinder popped out, I was hit with oakey, odd aromas. Out of the bottle it was brandy-brown, liquefied caramel, chicken gravy made from homemade stock. Syrupy legs slipped their glassy nylons, slithering seductive and sexy. This was no normal wine. Suddenly, as woody wonder hit my tongue, I remembered.

When my parents moved out of and sold my childhood home, my dad had found a carboy deep in the under-stair recesses of the basement. The airlock was Sahara dry, and we assumed the six or so gallons was lost to oxidation and history. He had no idea what it was, or why he’d forgotten about it, so before we poured it out on Dionysus’s grave, we sampled it. Turns out he’d made sherry. Possibly accidentally. Accidental sherry that had aged for five plus years in quiet, unmolested darkness.

I helped him bottle it, and just like he had, let its existence slip the fetters of my memory. By the time I found it, it had lived another five peaceful years, watching, waiting.

To sip a ten year old sherry, made by your father’s hand, is to reconnect to the way he spent his time. It’s his last vintage, the final fading fermentation of a life that reached full attenuation months ago. And now it’s all mine, salvaged from a dusty garage, plucked from my memory, planted in front of me to raise in cheers of life gone and life yet to live.

My dad's ten year old sherry in my grandma's (his mom's) hundred year old decanter.

My dad’s decade old sherry in my grandma’s (his mom’s) century old decanter.

Forgotten Friday: Surname

December 13, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Our names hover around us, a jumbled aura made of letters, arbitrary labels that give buckets of context about who we are before anyone even sees our face. Those few syllables can betray our sex, our nationality, our spirituality, even somtimes our rough socioeconomic standing. They’re the vanguards of identity, the first thing you ever give to a new friend, the last thing that marks your time on this planet.

Those omnastically inclined few may have done their research, know the countries of origin or the historical minutiae that led to their naming, but I’d be willing to bet a large majority don’t know much about their own last names. A few have it easy: the Coopers and Smiths and Millers can thank the strong and capable hands of their ancestors for their vocationally inspired names. The Johnsons and Jacksons and Thompsons can thank contemporary mankind’s obsession with paternal lineage. Those nouns turned names have it arguably the easiest, so pipe down there, Pope, King, and Woods.

I should note, too, that those examples only skate across the surface of Anglicized monikers. A mere handful that don’t touch the beauty and mystery enveloping the hundreds of thousands of names that paint a nominative rainbow of multiculturalism across the canvas of our planet. There are so many names, so many variations, so many interpretations, that it’s amazing we don’t all have to wear name tags at all times to get anything done when working together.

Some names aren’t as easy to source. Black, Brown, and White may seem obviously self descriptive, but what about Green, or Moody, or that one so close to me, Gray? Basic history says my name traces back to Gaelic (making it Scottish or Irish, and in turn explaining my red facial hair) but beyond that it’s only moderately educated guesses. The trail meanders back to the pronouncial mouthful – Ó Riabhaigh – meaning son or grandson of “the gray,” which may echo the foggy moors of our ancestral lands. One scholar even suggests it had to do with a “countenance of character,” in that my ancestors were sullen, quiet folk.

Doesn’t sound much like the Grays I know.

But it might, if I knew more Grays. I like to pretend I’m the last male in my line now that my dad is gone, the last one able to carry the proverbial torch and pass the four familiar letters onto my son. But I’m not. My dad had a brother. My uncle had four sons. Out there, somewhere, in the land of severed blood ties and family feuds, I have four cousins. Four more Grays, who, for all I know, could be just like me.

I knew their names once. I think as a kid, I even met them. But my dad and my uncle had it out after my grandmother passed; money was hoarded, childhood resentment flared from ember to inferno, and just like that, the idea and memory of my cousins disappeared across the salty waves of estrangement and Atlantic.

I’ve started looking for my uncle, but apprehension always stays my mouse hand before I delve too deep. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t a very good person. He’d caused a lot of turmoil in their childhood home, ever taking, rarely giving, monopolizing the love and resources of my grandparents while my father was left to solve the Rubix cube of the world on his own.

I don’t know if he’s still alive, and part of me, out of loyalty to the memory of my dad, wants to see an end date after the hyphen in his records. Somehow, it would make me mad to know my uncle survived where my father didn’t. It sounds terrible, and I feel terrible, but honesty never pretended to be kind. I only have the feelings my father left me, and no matter how hard I try, that resentment never heels to hereditary curiosity.

I instead like to look forward. Think of my name as it is now, and as it will be. I could spend hours digging at the graves of memories long interred in family lore, only to find nothing but more riddles in the bones and dust of the past. Or I could spend my time turning this name into something my father would be proud of, shouting it out into the world on the back of my words so that everyone knows that this Gray has no issues with countenance of character.

Pride, not regret. Future, not past. Our names define where we came from, and against our will, a good portion of who we are. But that doesn’t mean they seal us into any one fate. They are, after all, just humanity’s way of categorizing mind boggling diversity, like a massive genetic library’s Dewey decimal system.

You may not be able to control which section of the library you’re in, but you can control who checks out your book. Make sure your surname stands proud on that spine.

My great grandfather (apron) and other dude possibly related to me. Manchester, England – c. 1910

Forgotten Friday: Uncappd

June 21, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

(This post is dedicated to Elizabeth Marro, a great writer and blogging friend who had the patience to deal with me long enough to put together an excellent interview. Sorry I’m so late in posting this, Betsy.)

A bottle cap is an afterthought. A dimpled nothing used to keep fluid from spilling, the barely closed door to glass jail cell, a temporary seal that exists only to be pried up, removed, and thrown away.

Thrown away and rarely remembered, forever torn from its bottle and worldly purpose.

I always imagine that every bottle and cap is a monogamous pair, and once the two have been parted, its unlikely they’ll ever meet again. They are a young, summer romance where the boy lives in Philadelphia and the girl lives in Seattle; they’ll have their fun and walk the beaches of innocent puppy love, knowing full well their time is short and destined to end.

I keep a unique bottle cap from every different beer I drink. I’m not sure why, or what I plan to do with them, other than occasionally admire the rainbow of shiny metal that slowly grows bigger as I add to the freezer bag in my basement. To me they are beautiful reminders of my experiences. Self-contained works that are just as much a part of the beer as the label and the glass. Some artist, at some point, in some place, put some thought and some of herself into that 1.02 inches and 21 crowned teeth of rounded real-estate.

A few weeks ago while I was running, I saw a green glint on the side of my path and stopped. I found a tiny little screw-top cap, scuffed and abused but still clearly wearing its Smirnoff uniform proudly. Based on the color and size, I assumed it was from a 50ml “mini” of either Smirnoff Green Apple or Lime vodka. I felt bad just tossing it back into the overgrowth, partly because nature can’t do much with an old aluminum cap, and partly because it seemed lonely out there by itself. Recycling it seemed the fairest thing to do for all involved; a snail wouldn’t mistake it for a mate, it could be with a million of its friends at the recycling plant, and I’d feel like I helped the universe in some tiny way.

Before I got back to exorcising the beer from the night before, I wandered into the unkempt mess of the tiny strip of woodlands next to my office, looking for any other caps that had been abandoned, left to a leafy, muddy fate. I found several half buried bottles, labels long washed off by Maryland rain, filled halfway with dirt like they had gone feral in their few years away from humans. I also found several old Duracells, an empty bag of Doritos (Cool Ranch!), and a spare “donut” tire.

Just as I was about to give up, I spotted another cap playing chameleon with the ruddy dirt. This one was rusted to the point of tetanus worries, but I picked it up and pocketed it all the same. It said, boldly, “Corona Light”, which, for anyone who knows beer and Corona, seems like a brewing impossibility.

Then I spotted another catching some of retreating sun in its silver crown, regally demanding I come pick it up it. This one was more decorated than the other two, with white laurels circling the italicized M, G, D. It wasn’t quite as deteriorated as the Corona cap, and a thin black title – “Miller Brewing” – ran the circumference like dog tags; identification should the beer ever be lost in combat.

I tossed these three around in my hand, this motley crew of mainstream brew, wondering how they got here. Had a sad cubicle monkey forced down some vodka to make it through his work day? Had a few kids up to no good chugged whatever cheap beer they could lift from their uncle’s barbecue the weekend before? Had they been opened miles away and migrated in cars or pockets or trash bags, only to find their nearly-final graves here in the rarely-visited brush outside a boring corporate park?

The indignity.

So I rescued them. I know there are millions more out there, braving the elements all by themselves, slowly returning to the earth as carbon and iron and polyethylene. But at least these three can return to the great circle of brew-life, hopefully one day gracing the top of a new shiny bottle, standing tall and proud, if only for one glorious, ephemeral moment.

“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.” -Marcus Aurelius

Forgotten Friday: Cataloged

March 22, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Humans have an odd obsession with organization. Our science is built on the idea of discovering and evaluating the world so that we can properly quantify, classify, and put nature into little understanding-boxes. Spirituality is bent on finding and filtering philosophical explanations for the absurdity of our existence so we can codify, mollify, and beautify the unknowns of life.

We’re taught from as young as we can remember to be tidy and clean-up after ourselves, and as adults we pity anyone who can’t seem to organize themselves correctly. We have so many things for organization: desks, bookshelves, and libraries; computers, servers, and databases; boxes, closets, and warehouses. We even have organizational tools for highly specific kinds of items like tool chests and jewelry boxes and card catalogs.

Clever contraption for cataloging categorized cards.

My neighbor won this great metal beast at a Prince George’s County fairground estate auction. He’d bought it for his wife (who apparently had always wanted a card catalog, because hey, they’re sweet) and I helped him unload it from his pick-up truck.

First note: card catalogs weigh about 4500 pounds. Second note: when you buy a piece of furniture at an estate sale, you get everything inside of that piece of furniture as well.

Before we carried it inside the house, we riffled through each drawer, looking for trash and treasures and trinkets. From first glances it appeared this catalog belonged to a handyman of sorts; someone who needed a crude filing system for his assorted pieces of string, metal, and wood. We found all kinds of random things inside: old paint brushes, six balls of twine, four small packs of copper rivets, two small boxes of brads (that spilled everywhere), a half-used can of saddle soap, an old manila envelope full of tempered steel nails (slightly rusty), a large timer in a metal case, a very old Honeywell wall-mounted thermostat, and five random, non-matching gloves.

We also found 3 bars of FELS-NAPTHA heavy duty laundry soap (often used as a home remedy to treat poison ivy and oak), each in different states of deterioration.

Stain pre-treatment for the handyman who wants to keep his clothes fresh.

Stain pre-treatment for the discerning handyman who wants to keep his clothes fresh.

Fascinated by the cross-section of life that these tidbits represented, I began to wonder who had owned this, filled it with his junk without purpose or reason, left it full of junk to be sold at auction at some random point in the future. After searching all the drawers, we finally came across another envelope – this one filled with other bits of metal – with a name written in stylized pencil: John Stubbs.

Using the age and packaging of the FELS-NAPTHA soap as a rough time marker, public records for Maryland show two John Stubbs this catalog could have possibly belonged to, one living (age 81) and one recently deceased. Both lived close to where the catalog was purchased, and worked in fields (power and tractors) that could have led to the collection and accumulation of so many random pieces of repairbilia.

Stubbs. John Stubbs. I’ll take an old card catalog, shaken, not stirred.

It is simultaneously creepy and cool to dig through items that belong(ed) to a complete stranger. You get to build whatever stories about their life you want: who they were, what they did, how they did it, why it ended up in your hands. You get a tiny, untainted view of a part of a life, a connection to this person without bias or structure or presupposition. This card catalog contained more that just assorted crap, it contained a microcosm of John Stubbs, an everlasting, undying reminder of the years he spent through the stuff he used.

We’ll all leave behind card catalogs of sorts. An echo in our possessions Boxes of old, unlabeled photos, notes in the margins of our favorite books, tooth marks on the end of a careworn pen. It will be the legacy of who we were to the people we never met. A final footprint that can’t be so easily erased by time. Our final chance to organize the memories of our time on the planet.

What will be in your catalog?

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

Forgotten Friday: First Attempts

January 11, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In between the blur of beer and video games of my sophomore year of undergrad, I started writing a novel. I thought, in typical 20-year-old fashion, that I had learned enough about life and writing and had the requisite knowledge to write an entire book. I created an elaborate outline and starting clacking away at my little re-furbished Asus with literary abandon.

I thought the premise was brilliant: a young, misanthropic college student records the behavior of the undead (Jane Goodall style) in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. At the climax of the story his hubris leads to him getting bitten and he revisits his diary, making footnotes as he begins to slowly turn into one of the things he’d been hiding from/studying for an entire year.

But very quickly, because of my lack of any focus and real experience, the story degraded into nothing but random scenes and overly visceral descriptions of the reanimated dead. I wrote ~3000 words about the nuance of how flesh falls off of a zombie’s face, for some reason.

Wall of text crits you for 90,000 damage. You die from boredom.

Wall of Text critically hits you for 90,000 damage. You die from boredom.

I got lost in a maze of wanting everything to be the best writing in the history of writing, throwing out stupidly complex vocabulary, piling on unnecessary details, and inserting random asides just because I thought they sounded great. I hadn’t learned any lessons about my own writing, so my voice was weak and dense and boring.

I was drawing from years of exposure to the zombie subculture, but doing very little creating of my own. Everything was a cliche; the way the virus spread, the way the zombies looked, sounded, and moved, my character’s motivations and assumptions about the world.

It had no dialogue. At all. The protagonist was an archetypal asshole. I couldn’t figure out how to transition between chapters, so I just didn’t.

This generic, boring tragedy went on for about 4 months. I stopped writing at about 41,000 words.

Until this morning, I hadn’t looked at that manuscript since the “Last Modified Date” (9/3/2007), because I was afraid of what I’d find. It’s ugly. Repulsive. A perfect collection of unforgivable mistakes and errors that sums up how terrible a writer I was, packed to the margins with my insecurities and collegiate arrogance.

But I refuse to delete it. It is awful and will exist in a perpetual state of editing, but it was my first attempt. My first-born. The first time I really committed to trying something outside of the familiar, the comfortable. This document is milestone zero on my journey to become a writer. To delete it would be a futile attempt to forget where I came from.

Revisiting it now solidifies a lesson that I think a lot of us can take away from NaNoWriMo: Not everything we write is going to be great. Not everything is going to be as clear and coherent as we hoped or expected. Not everything is going to be publishable.

It is great to aim high. I’ll pretty much always suggest that someone aim as high as their imagination allows. Stretching and trying and growing is how you’ll improve, even if you don’t actually reach whatever goal you set.

But at the same time, be realistic. A musician doesn’t expect to write a number one hit every time he picks up his guitar, so don’t expect the Pulitzer for the essay or short story you jotted down after work. Practice and have confidence in your ideas, and you can’t help but improve.

If you pour yourself into your art, eventually the art will pour out of you.

The first big thing you ever write is an act of artistic puberty; an awkward time where you’re forced to experience all kinds of unpleasant things all for the sake of maturing. The acne will clear up. Your hormones will stop raging. Your voice will no longer crack at random, but be strong and consistent and uniquely yours.

As you continue to write, take some time to look back on your earliest work. Open up those NaNo novels in a few months (or even years). It’s amazing to see how far you’ve come, and gives you hope for all those miles you still have to go.

The entire thing reads like this. Pompous would be an understatement.

The entire thing reads like this. I am so sorry everyone.

Forgotten Friday: Reliving The Dream

December 28, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

My family has owned property in Chincoteague, Virginia, since 1990. It was our go-to summer vacation spot; a quiet and quaint little beach town with pristine white sand beaches and ponies clopping around like they were human.

I fell in love with the Eastern Shore a long time ago. The setting sun striking the water and reeds at just the right angle produces blues and yellows and greens that I’ve yet to see anywhere else in the world. There is a peace to being in a small town on the water, as if I have stepped back into a simpler, safer, less complicated time.

My parents chose to retire in Chincoteague. This turns all of our family gatherings into compulsory beach trips. A tragedy, I assure you.

The trip from Washington DC to Chincoteauge is a straight-forward, 3.5 hour affair, with little to see except the flat sprawling farmlands that hug Route 50 and Route 13. The occasional farmer’s market or antique store breaks up the monotony of corn and juvenile potatoes. It’s an easy, relaxing drive that usually helps soften and melt the stress of hectic DC life.

Just before the island, there is a 10 mile stretch that passes through the unassuming town of New Church, VA. It boasts a population of 205, dozens of annex offices for corporations supporting the nearby Wallops Island NASA base, and the ruins of a yellow and red building that dominates the major curve on the road through town.

This was someone’s dream, once.

I can remember when this wasn’t the shell of a venue, but a fully operational roller rink. If the parking lot on a Friday night was any example of the success of the business, The Dream Roller Rink was thriving in the mid-nineties. It often had signs promoting “all-skate nights” and food specials. Given the lack of not-beach-related activities in Chincoteague, I can imagine this roller rink was a great place for kids to spend evenings while on vacation.

Just behind the decaying rink, a short road leads to another yellow and red building in an even worse state of disrepair.

I’ve never actually been to a drive-in theater, which seems a shame.

This matching ruin was once a matching drive-in theater, owned by the same family. Both were built in 1940 by Elijah Justice who wanted to offer some entertainment for the local population and the sailors from the nearby Chincoteague Naval Air Station. The station closed in 1959 and the Justice family fought for decades to keep both the rink and drive-in financially soluble despite a dwindling pool of patrons.

Through the 70’s and 80’s the drive-in showed exclusively pornographic movies, which seems really bizarre for an open-air, drive in theater. Despite these attempts to bring in revenue through any means possible, the theater officially stopped its projectors in 1988. The screen, stained and drooping, hung on until 1998.

The only signs that this was ever a drive-in are the decaying brick concession stand and dozens of speaker poles, which have all been dug up and de-speakered.

No parking, even if you could.

The rink stayed open for two more decades, finally shutting down in 2008. A local developer, Don Brown, bought the rink and drive-in, hoping to restore both to bring an Art Deco renaissance back for the seasonal visitors to enjoy. Unfortunately, his vision was never achieved due to a land dispute with a neighbor and some poorly drawn property lines.

In the five years since it closed, The Dream has suffered the ravages of coastal storms, acrid salt air, and petty vandalism. The lipstick red has faded to cracking pink, and the mustard yellow has washed out to pale daisy. A relatively clean spot marks where the illuminated sign used to sit above the main entrance. It is a haunting reminder of a different time, socially and economically.

I couldn’t find what happened to the rest of the Justice family, but I assume they’ve long since abandoned their dreams of The Dream.

Roller Rink – Before and After:

Top image, courtesy me, 2012. Bottom image courtesy Cary Scott, 2008

Top image courtesy Cary Scott, 2008. Bottom image courtesy me, 2012.

Drive-In – Before and After:

Top image courtesy Drive-In Theatres of the Mid-Atlantic, 1998. Bottom image courtesy me, 2012.

Another interesting note: Writer Paul Hendrickson wrote an article about The Dream for the Washington Post on June 24, 1988, the same year the drive-in portion closed down.

Forgotten Friday: Some Old Gym

December 7, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

(To my new readers: Sometimes, on Friday, I’ll do a post in a series called “Forgotten Friday.” Its focus is modern archaeology, or things that have gotten lost in plain sight. See here, here, here, and here for previous post in this series.)

I have irrational empathy for inanimate things. In the small town where I did my undergraduate studies, there was a little Korean restaurant that I always wanted to go to, only because it never had any customers. I talk and apologize to damaged cars in parking lots because I feel like their owners don’t love them. I even go as far as to worry about particularly unkempt lawns, as if the grass is somehow in pain because it hasn’t been manicured regularly.

Remember that old IKEA commercial with the lamp? That’s how I feel, just about all the time.

I work in a nondescript office building in a small corporate park in Maryland. It’s one of those places that you don’t even notice that you don’t notice because it is so short and brown and plain; the kind of place that no one comes to except to trudge through their work day in whatever placed deigned appropriate by their boss’s boss’s boss.

In this building is a single room that is sadder than the others. A room that from outward appearance once perspired with potential, but has fallen into a state of lonely abandonment. It’s not some obscurely placed storage closet. It’s not the creepy, drafty loading dock. It’s not the deli of questionable freshness.

It’s the poor little fitness room.

The door is locked, which seems strange, because in four years working here I think I’ve only seen about four people in this room. It is organized and tidy, as clean as a fitness area should reasonably be, and at first glance, not so bad.

What you might expect a gym to look like, I suppose.

But the devil hides his cruel smile in the details. The rack of free weights is wobbly, and in a way that could be easily fixed. One of the 20 lb barbells is missing, making it the only incomplete pair. The metal of the weights is pockmarked with years of mistreatment. The lighter weights in the set look as if they were salvaged from the local dump.

I don’t even know how you would intentionally remove that outer rubber coating, never mind accidentally.

Tucked in the corner, as if shamefully hidden there by some long gone member of this ghostly gym, is a stack of tapes. VHS tapes. Anachronistic fitness celebrities stare blankly from the brightly colored sleeves, echoing fitness crazes of decades passed. Billy Blanks grins at me, urging me to do some Tae Bo. There is no VCR in the room.

“Kick, punch, it’s all in the mind.”

The machines are all functional, but dated. They wear the unmistakable clothes of the mid-90s; garish, unsophisticated LCD displays and boxy, hard-edged design. They were probably technological marvels when they first arrived, but now they look like rows of antiques, carefully lined up as if on display in a museum of fitness history.

Never mind the age of the machine, I just can’t run on a treadmill. I never feel like I’m going anywhere.

Directly in front of the center treadmill is a tiny picture, pinned to the wall. This piece of paper has been on the wall for about three years now; it appeared as if by magic sometime in early 2010. Sometimes I wonder who took the time to so carefully cut out this picture and so intentionally place it where it is the only thing you can focus on while running. Were they aiming to one day conquer the seventh, using the idea of playing this hole as motivation to get back into shape? Did they ever make it to Pebble Beach? Did their time in this room, on this very treadmill, start a journey that ended with a little white ball dropping quietly into a hole as West-Coast waves crashed on nearby rocks?

The famous "Seventh Hole" of Pebble Beach Golf Links.

The somewhat famous seventh hole of Pebble Beach Golf Links.

I don’t think I’ll ever know. I’ll never know who used this place and to what end; whose life has been improved at the hands of these stalwart, endlessly hard working machines.

But I’ll continue to feel bad for this room. I’ll continue to think about its underused potential. I’ll continue to picture it sitting in the dark, on the bottom floor of the building, neglected by everyone except a select, disciplined few.

Maybe someday, when the economy rebounds, and this corporate park thrives with the energy of optimism and fervor of growth, this gym will once again become a place of dedication and personal transformation.

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