Prologue
For each piece of writing, I've provided a brief excerpt (of my choosing) and then provided a link to the full document, for your perusal. Simply follow the link to the document!
Nonfiction
Friday Night, pg. 6-7.
My best friend Gary and I didn't have anything to do that Friday, so we packed up at ten in the morning and made the two hour drive from Grand Rapids to Ann Arbor. We hadn't made the drive in some time, making it one of the longest drives of the year. It was sunny and bright outside, but Michigan weather dictated that the last days of March had to be cold, had to be windy as hell, so much so that my Honda Accord had trouble staying in the middle of the lane, buffeted by gusts that rolled across the flat farmland that stretched for miles between Grand Rapids and Lansing, and Lansing and Ann Arbor. We met up with Bobby and Nate, great friends and Gary's bandmates, and while they practiced, I tried to write papers that were due, but kept getting interrupted by my own inability to focus, the antsy nature of my inner child beginning to tread water.
We spent the afternoon sitting around, playing video games, singing "Love Fool" by The Cardigans to strangers via the revolutionary communications network, Chatroulette, and eating, always eating.
It had become a ritual and I wondered if anyone else did the same. Everyone looks forward to Friday as an escape, a leisurely time spent with friends, with family, with yourself, but how many others like us, kids just waiting to beat up on each other to a dissonant soundtrack, the normally unpleasant, jarring chords tugging at the strings that hold us up on the dance floor, were sitting on their couches, playing Magic: The Gathering and drinking Four Loko? We couldn't possibly be alone in our thoughts, in our pre-game festivities.
It reminds me of the first time I went to a punk show. My friends and I showed up to see one of our favorite bands at the time, Mustard Plug, a band that is still playing shows and touring furiously, even though the guys in the band are in their forties. We were so surprised so surprised at how many other kids were at the show. It was in Muskegon, Michigan, at the Rock Harbor Café, a movie theater they turned into a place for shows, tearing down the movie screens and setting up bands on the tiny stage.
What stuns me, even now, are the groups of kids I see at every show. Every single time, I'm blown away by how many people show up, whether it's ten people at the Division Ave. Arts Cooperative for a local artist playing an acoustic guitar, or one hundred and fifty people at the Metal Frat waiting for their favorite hardcore band to strike that first chord.
click for pdfFiction
George Marshall, pg. 8-9
George and Miriam had first met in the small town of Ossineke, Michigan. It was on the coast of Thunder Bay. As George and Miriam's relationship was beginning in Michigan, so was my life. I was being born to a woman in Grand Haven, some three-hundred miles across the state. The great thing about living in Michigan is the ability to point to your hand and say "I was born here." If you could see my hand, I would be pointing just below the nail on my pointer finger, toward the middle of my fingerprint: that's Ossineke. I am now pointing at the base of my pinky finger: that's Grand Haven.
Ossineke was one of those places you always saw signs for, but would never visit because it always seemed out of the way (which is exactly what it was). The only thing the town was (and is) known for was the Dinosaur Gardens, a zoo and park started in the 1930s that takes you back to the days of the dinosaurs and cavemen, but which also shows you how Jesus influenced their lives. Yes, it is an exhibit on Jesus riding with the dinosaurs. It was designed to show that Jesus had, in fact, walked with the dinosaurs, and all sorts of creatures that were previously rendered "fictional" by the Christians in charge. Being in that position is overrated, I think. No one listens, and the little control you do have is so easily snatched away by minor characters that it's utterly futile to keep things together. I'm surprised the Dinosaur Gardens are still up-and-running.
They met at a diner. She was a waitress, born in Charlevoix, which is at the tip of my ring finger. George Marshall was born in Alabama somewhere. He was a traveling salesman, going to door-to-door with his car filled up with portable calculators, which were a relatively new invention at the time. Only a few years before that, they were all too big to fit on a side table, let alone in a backpack pocket. Michigan and Alabama were the two biggest markets for pocket calculators at that time, for reasons unbeknownst to George, but reasons didn't matter much: what mattered was getting from Point A to Point B, all the while selling pocket calculators to whoever would take one. I remember my mother buying a pocket calculator from a traveling salesman in 1976. It was an Adler 81S and it features a fluorescent display. She used it on her math homework, as she was a senior in college at that time.