Tag Archives: Ben W

Uncategorized, writing

Saddles, and How to Use Them

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I wrote exactly one goddamned blog post during the entire year of 2012.  I decided that I should change that.

So here I am, but with a new purpose.  What I’m going to do here for the foreseeable future is talk as often as I care to about the processes and struggles that I’m going through to create things that I like to create — that might be writing, or pictures, or podcasts, or some other project that requires me to invent something in my brain and expose it to the world.  I thought some focus might help me to saddle up here again.  Also, I’m clearly not getting enough mileage out of those 140-character quips.

I talked to the K-Bear last week, and we thought that we could both use a little writing review/motivation, so I’m going to grab the bull (I am really loving these ranching metaphors) and be the first to toss something out there.  I have a long-standing project that I probably just haven’t had the courage to complete.  I want to write a fictionalized account of my misadventures with my best friends from middle school, and the days we spent biking across snowmobile trails, reading comic books, playing arcade and/or Super Nintendo games, throwing knives at trees, stealing Playboys, and other dumb stuff that 13 or 14 year-old boys do in the Northwoods.

It’s been tough for me to build up some momentum on this project because while the memories are very important to me, it’s hard to see a compelling narrative emerging from the stories.  My best friend, Ben, passed away in 2005, and it seems obvious that that event will come up in this story.  But how do you transition from the simple joys of youth to the heavy reality of adulthood?  Up to this point, I’ve taken time to write down things I remember, I interviewed Clint to get some of his thoughts, and not much else.  This is a project that I absolutely want to finish (at least the first complete draft) in 2013.

So, I’ll send Joe and Wordy a couple thousand words, and next week I’ll try to send them a couple thousand more.  Gotta start somewhere.

General, Uncategorized

Martian Dreaming

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Had a really odd dream last night.

An old friend and I were the first humans to go to Mars, although the mission wasn’t initially planned that way.  The deal was, we’d stay in the lander, and deploy a number of robotic probes from our craft.

Once we got there, it became pretty clear that I hadn’t trained for the mission at all, asking my buddy what I should be doing, where my spacesuit was, and generally just watching him take care of a lot of the heavy mission-critical lifting.  At one point on that first day, a few of those probes malfunctioned; their wheels didn’t deploy, and we couldn’t move them around.  Even though it was night, and I’d have trouble locating the probes, I went outside, found them, and manually popped the wheels down.  Problem hopefully solved.

On our second day at the Red Planet, we realized it was awfully strange that I hadn’t needed my helmet to go out the day before; clearly, there was a lot more oxygen in the Martian atmosphere than was initially reported.  I had even gone out in bare feet, for chrissakes.  I decided I would wear shoes on day two, because you sure don’t want to cut your foot on a Martian rock, and get infected with some alien bacteria you’ve never encountered before, right?

So both of us head out in the morning on Sol 2, now with the bright light of day making the surrounding terrain easy to see.  In the distance, there was a strip mall and a Target store.  That seemed weird for Mars, too.  Looking up in the sky, we saw the Moon, and thought that perhaps we weren’t on Mars after all.  Turns out my friend Ben wasn’t very good at steering our rocket.  Despite his best efforts, we hadn’t even escaped Earth’s atmosphere, and after taking off from Cape Canaveral, we landed our ship in western Wyoming, thinking we’d reached Mars.

It sure was a fast trip.