Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Sometimes I wonder why I write since I seem to be running into more roadblocks these days. I put many hours into a project even though it might never reach fruition due to someone else's disinterest or rejection. Worse yet, I might never finish the project because I am tired or do not know how to complete it. The obstacles keep mounting whether they are external, such as committee meetings or more papers to grade, or internal, especially self-doubt and inability to commit to ideas. I seldom have writer's block, but I often lack the commitment to do the hard work of editing or revising.  Writing is a commitment that sometimes feels too much like a compulsion because I often find myself writing when I should be relaxing. I want to write in my free time, but I also want to sleep, watch television, or listen to music. Instead, I try to push through, but my job and other commitments have made it increasingly hard to do so. There are only so many hours in a day is a truism that does ...

I've been taking long walks most of my life. I have many reasons: to clear my mind, to enjoy the outdoors, to exercise. Ah, who am I kidding, it is mostly to clear my mind and think. I like to walk for hours and take different routes each time, exploring each city and town I have lived in and taking stock of my surroundings. I want to explore each nook and cranny of the town because I am never sure what I will see or hear. It's exploratory surgery of the soul and feels akin to listening to a favorite old record that you have heard a thousand times but are always prepared to appreciate in a new way. Maybe you hear a wonky note or a backing vocal that you never noticed before. Or a fuzz box, drum fill, or exotic key change that never resonated. Discovering where the trails are is as important to me as finding a new back alley path or steps to nowhere that invariably lead to a private yard. These moments of discovery make my walks worthwhile. I sometimes take trails tha...

As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction every day, I often discover snippets of writing in notebooks or in long-forgotten files on my hard drive. Generally, I know what they are. At least, I have some idea of why I wrote them. If they are nonfiction, I sometimes revise them for blog posts. The fiction snippets are more difficult to use. I always tell myself that I will finish the story or find a place to use it in the ever-expanding novel that I secretly contend is narratively daring. This snippet is amusing, if nothing else, so I am sharing it. Perhaps, I want to remind myself at some future date that I will eventually finish each of these brief pieces. Another thing, why did I think I could use goosebump as a verb? For this story, I wonder what was coming next: a scary ghost story, a humorous tale, a novel about Bill and his madcap crew of camp rangers, or the secret life of William Jefferson Clinton. One thing I do know is that I am now hungry for s'mores. Take it ...

Those who know me are familiar with my obsessive list making. Every day I make lists that are long, unwieldy, and unlikely to be completed. It is part of my mania that I separate these lists into three categories: fun items, daily teaching/writing tasks, and ongoing writing projects. I listed the fun items first on purpose because these are the most likely to be completed. Sometimes I do actually finish the daily teaching/writing tasks. If not, they roll over to the next day. The ongoing writing projects are generally tasks that I have been working on since time immemorial, and I am not I will ever finish most of them. They too are moved from list to list obsessively until I finally remove them because I can no longer be so masochistic. Andrei Codrescu, in a 1989 collection of his "All Things Considered" essays, Raised By Puppets, Only To Be Killed By Research , writes about lists in a tellingly accurate, yet humorous essay, "Today We List, Tomorrow We Fail." He...

My memories of the first place I lived are fuzzy. I remember orange carpeting and brown walls in the trailer my parents rented the first three years of my life before we moved into the house on 6th Avenue that they still live in thirty years later. I remember a car my mom drove a few years later when she first got her license a little better. It was a tan sedan, a nondescript Ford or Mercury model with leather seats that smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke and oil, making my young mind think of the piles of dog poop soured by age that sat in the back yard of my parent's home until we got around to cleaning them up. I cannot remember if most of these experiences were truly real. I know that car was because I was around seven years old when my mother finally learned to drive. She had a series of cars that came from my grandfather's Ford dealership. Later she got her own, but my grandpa drove cars from his garage my entire life; they too smelled of cigarette smoke and old oil. ...

As spring turns to summer, I often feel old as I remember all of the summers I have spent lazily reading comics and fiction or watching television when I know that I should be writing. Of course, I also spend time outside, usually bicycling, walking, or swimming. These days, however, I generally feel too warm as the humidity and temperature creep up to a shocking eighty degrees. There were many summers where I spent time fishing or running down the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, tripping over the roots of tired trees that lined the walk. One year a friend and I shamefully rode our bikes into sapling poplar trees, leaving black, oozing marks on their trunks. Last time I checked there was only one of those trees left, still battle scarred and defiant. The tree is thirty feet tall now, but its trunk is gnarled and shrunken from our youthful transgressions. Another time I rode my bicycle into a nearby water-filled ditch to avoid bees that were chasing me. They still stung me, and it...

The snow is piling up outside even though it is April, and I am sitting in my office procrastinating. I think of winters past, that time of year when it gets so very dark out and the creepy, childhood monsters seem to be waiting at your door. I would get off the school bus and run through the short space between the street and my house like I was afraid. The lights were bright in the house and there was spaghetti on the stove. The family would sit down to eat and discuss the events of the day. I played batman video games and listened to oldies radio. Perhaps, I drank some hot chocolate. Now I work and think about that hot chocolate. Tonight when I go home, I hope it won't seem that dark, but I bet the hot chocolate will be just as good.

Over the past few years, I feel like I have begun to slowly unravel. I feel like I lost part of myself that I might not be able to reclaim. I am far more tired than I feel I have the right to be. But I also have never learned how not to be hard on myself. A colleague told me recently that "you are always so hard on yourself. You have to learn your self worth." Nothing could be truer, but it is hard to rediscover my value because of my own negative thoughts and self-deprecation. All the stress from my PhD studies is finally catching up with me. When I was working on my dissertation, I never had that much time to worry because I was so busy trying to get it done. Now I feel even busier. I teach five classes and have five tutoring sessions on top of it. I am working on an article that does not seem to be gelling quite like I want it to, and I hope that I can eventually catch up on sleep. My stress management seems to be failing me. I get home after a busy day at work and pre...

I often feel the pull of the written word, encouraging me to read and write fiction far more than I have time for. Yet I have so many stressors in my life, pulling me in all directions, halting my efforts and sapping my strength. It is all I can do to put a few words down on paper for a book chapter I am working on or scribble a few notes for my movie list. I write this from the standpoint of finishing my doctoral dissertation in the spring, teaching the equivalent of six courses, and trying my best to seek tenure. During these rough spells, I have been trying to read fiction and slowly writing a little. Someday I hope to get back to my manuscript and at least finish one novel or a few short stories or pull a few more of my grey hairs out. I take comfort in the fact that many are late bloomers to this fiction game. However, I have been writing fiction for more than two decades and have never taken it all that seriously. It is a given, but there is something to be said for sitting dow...

" One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up , 1945 I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce. I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenur...

These days are increasingly fueled by an antiseptic need for withdrawal -- a calm pause before the perpetual storm. The work mounts, and I disappear into intoxication and minimal self-effacement, transferring my energy to fiction instead of mounting abstracts and applications. I write prose poetry about my lack of ambition, while i thumb through interminable drafts of student papers, failed fiction, and the occasional listicle written on tattered notebook pages.  I write lists like a man possessed, usually finishing the easy items or transferring them to another list, asking for nothing less than being done eternally. Yet my manic energies and anxieties compound such lists. I sit entranced at the computer screen, looking at another file, attempting madly to use all the ink in my listing pen.  Did an emo song or an old, lovelorn rock 'n' roll song start this way? A person at the end of their energies, writing about someone or something that done 'em wrong keeps on kee...

Where do the years, weeks, and days go? I imagine they are stored in underground caverns loaded with greying filing cabinets. Or are they, like my writing, forgotten in folders and files. I often think of the nonfiction essays, the short stories, the uncracked and lonely novels I have started. Is it 1996? Is it 2004? The drafts remain unfinished. I put them off for work at the restaurant. I put them off for graduate school, theses, and dissertations. I put them off to teach course after course, telling myself that I will finish this year. I know it won't happen until I'm old and grey. Will it happen before I'm buried under an oak tree, green grass spreading over my unharried corpse.

Each summer I rack up an amazing list of wasted opportunities, unproductive mishmashes of scattered writing, files full of mindless ramblings all in search of effectual copy. I write a lot and read even more in order to continually perfect my game, but fall under the weight of the work, ineffectually stumbling back months later and wondering where to begin. As writers many of us fall into this pattern, putting work down never to return to it or never able to quite pick up where we left off. Summer is the time for me to supposedly catch up, but life always gets in the way. Even my blog posts trickle recently as dissertation chapters take all of my time. Fiction and essay writing are relegated to brief meanderings as I focus all of my attention on one never-ending project. While I just finished my dissertation introduction, so now I plan on writing more, updating old posts and returning to music, film, comics, and the essayistic scene of the crime instead of dropping in every once in...

There were times when the nights seemed longer than days. We would walk for hours down the darkened paths, deliberate yet tentative, roaming like wild animals through the streets of the city. Deliberating, planning, and articulating what was wrong with the world. Elders would accuse us of trying to solve the world's problems. Joe's dad commended us for our forethought, yet tried to insinuate his ideas about life and how to live it into our framework. He was helpful and insightful at times. At others, we thought his observations a nuisance. What did we know? We were young, hanging out in schoolyards, behind houses, walking and walking, thinking and thinking. Young minds never at rest. The fulcrum of our existence resting on our discussions. The life experience would come later. A hard punch in the gut, better than a hard slug in the chest, it carried a force that brought me to my knees, staggered, bleeding, and ready for more. Lessons that I learned did not necessarily rest on...

Sundays used to be a time to relax with a good cup of hot cocoa. My grandfather would swing by our house for a cup of coffee. He would stay for a long time before going into work at the garage. Or I would climb into my dad's old red F-150 and we'd go partridge hunting down the back roads outside  town, prowling for startled birds. We would drive down those lonely old dirt roads for hours, searching for dinner, scouring in the musky air. Sundays have always held a peculiar fascination for me. Days of rest, maybe, but they can also be days of great excitement. Lately though, they're just more days to work. In front of a computer screen, I dole out the daily word count, wishing I could be up north or down south, any damn where but here. I'd rather be running through the woods, disc golfing, just walking down the street, and instead I'm here. I guess it's time to go. Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED5s1-Fe9FA Kris Kr...

There are dreams and then, there are those dreams, shiny opalescent, glittery baubles bursting on the seashore of shattered horizons, the clattering of teeth in the cold dark, imaginary fingertips under blankets, stretched over my childhood bed. Recurring transactions with sandmen unknown, standing tall and imposing in darkened doorways, shuffling on flat feet, fidgeting in the early morning breeze, silvery frying pan in hand that turns slowly into a gold plated Ruger. Please mom, make it stop. I can't go on -- but I must, screaming with tattered voice, as the large visitor hovers, pointing its amorphous weapon. Paralyzed nightly, I see its slick face and fear that I might die, blanketed in a real cold sweat, trapped under the weight of lumbering fear. Is the door closed or open? Movement isn't an option anymore,  whether it ever was, trapped in stasis, awake or asleep, the gun or the knife. I can't see it, except in the periphery, behind my line of sight, yet clearly in my...

The first time I read Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung , I hunkered down for the long haul on the floor of the bathroom at my old house and read and read and read. Bangs' manic prose and uncompromising taste enthralled me, sucking me deeper into rock critic fandom. It was definitely the late '90s, and I was in the early, heady stages of compulsive record collecting. I had already worked my way through a large chunk of the Greil Marcus catalog, but I was mostly known for my love of Flipside , MRR , and later Punk Planet , the bigger punk rock fanzines, which I would read front to back in study hall, poring over obscure record reviews and tantalizing columns, not forgetting the letter page. As I read over his many obsessions that night and into the early hours of dawn, while I should have been preparing for some exam or other, I felt like a kindred soul. Though I never entirely agreed with Bangs, or always understood just where he was coming from, I un...

One summer when I was a kid, perhaps 1990 or 1991, my great aunt enrolled me in nature classes in Cable, Wisconsin. They were held once a month and taught youngsters about wildflowers, animals, and respect for the earth. We would ride in her old tan Mercury Lynx into wilderness that seemed larger and more wooded than near my house; the area was hillier and covered with heavier, older trees. The woods seemed to hang over the narrow roads, some on hills that stretched into the distance. On either side of these roads, it seemed like one slight slip of the wheel would send the car plummeting into the ravine. The telephone poles were tall and felt straighter, pointing down into the crumbling earth. It was very green -- the trees were full of leaves and visible soil was clay red. Cable was about an hour northwest of my hometown in Bayfield County, and the start of the Birkebeiner cross country skiing race. We must have taken highway 13 north to 77 and gone west. I have never returned, bu...

The clouds started forming at five o'clock pm The funnel clouds touched down five miles north of Russellville Sirens were blowing, clouds spat rain As the thing came through, I swear it sounded like a train -- Drive-By Truckers, "Tornadoes" A massive F3 tornado came through my hometown of Park Falls, Wisconsin in the summer of 1985. My family and I were spending the night at my grandparent's cabin 20 miles away riding out what we thought was a typical summer storm. Mostly all I remember was reading comics at the cabin and the usual fights I had with my uncle (he is only three years older than me). I kept my comics at the cabin, but after this tornado I got into reading them more. I put them in boxes and I would have to hide them in the basement with each passing summer storm. In the morning my dad went to survey the damage of the storm. We used to have big, sheltering trees in the front yard and these were gone now. They had been toppled over by the winds. On...

My mind floats between images on the screen, pure and pristine, and flickering print in books, studying, fretting, thoughtfully coursing through tons of material -- materiel? The list is long and twisting: Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus, The Foundations of Screenwriting by good ol' Syd Field, a horror movie podcast, (complete with cheesy trailers), Robert Bloch's Psycho , Don DeLilo's White Noise   the twisted golden age comics of Fletcher Hanks. This is all part of the process in studying for PhD exams. Throw it in a blender and hit frappe.