Summer Breeze

Dear blog,

As usual, my time spent in life altering affairs left me with little time and desire to actually write about them. My summer was so packed with fabulous events that it is only now, that life has returned to monotonous academia, that I feel compelled to plunger the depths of my soul for yet more floods of pointless, self-aggrandizing verbiage.

That being said, I hope that the bulk of sane readers have made hasty exit, for this may include some embarrassing material.

I ended the spring semester on May 1st with straight A's in Statistics II, Calculus I (honors), Foundations of Education, Special Education and Multicultural Education (honors) and a bad case of general malaise. Most of the semester had been wonderful. The tail end however, was not a fairy tale ending. I felt that I had no control over one of my grades and received negative comments on a final project, regardless of my top-of-the-class status. Finals had drained me; the whole semester had drained me. My first week upon returning I spent in general disarray before regaining a normal sense of self, with the help of some friends.

Shortly thereafter, my friend and two of her friends were in a bad car accident. The driver hit her head on the rear-view and lost a fair amount of blood. The guy in the back-seat hit his head on his own thigh, and my friend's leg received severe muscle damage.

The driver and rear passenger, part of a group of pot-heads; this had been the only car and driver's license between them, so I came to the rescue (awkward sentence!). Trips to the hospital and doctor's office earned me a fair number of brownie points with the heads and friend. Assistance cleaning my friend's legs in the shower got me a fair few more. I don't really feel much like talking about the subject, but I'm sure it deserves mention in the list o' things I did this summer.

Shortly thereafter an interesting social development: I won't go into the sordid details of the back-story, but overview. A girl, Katie, who I had engaged in befuddled high-school semi-dating messiness and abandoned as a person around age twenty made a re-entrance. A friend named Rheanna, once part of the social circle including myself, the befuddled mate, another befuddled person and a boyfriend and girlfriend or eight, tried desperately and for no discernible reason to get me to talk to Katie again.

I could get no insight into why from, Alex, the boyfriend, nor Sam, the injured observer, nor from my own prodigious mind. I resisted initially, before relenting and talking to Katie once more. I had my own delusions, that I was the kind of person who could remain detached, who could act out revenge, be cold and heartless, could engage in one-night-standery. These goofy thoughts roamed my head as I talked to Katie and slowly came to the realization that I was none of those things.

Meanwhile, I started a summer class, Calculus II, condensed to eight weeks from sixteen at Cuyahoga Community College. The last class I'll ever take there, as I have been taking classes since 2004 and actually have hit some kind of technical time maximum, as well as gained an associates degree. I started making chain-mail, a vest, and two pieces for others to be completed before summer's end.

These things I'm not entirely sure of the start dates, in my head they all blur together as things I started in May and June.

So there I was, making chain-mail while deciding what to make of my new relationship with this old face and learning the tedious facets of algebraic nonsense on top of calculaic theory, when yet another social avenue opened up to me. A girl named Gretta, who I barely knew in my early days of college (while I was still flunking out/going to Community College full time) -- I remember only one clear experience that involved her actually. Her whispering to someone else in the room, though not quietly enough, that I was creeping her out. (I used to sit and stare a lot.) -- came part of the package with Katie, as best friend. She liked the more confident and talkative version of me, and made blatant advances within days of dumping her guy, Dan.

My primary fear of moving in too quickly after a break-up was mitigated by the fact that she was dead sexy, and on June 26 I officially asked her out, around nine in the morning, after a long, long, extraordinarily fun night. I fell in love with her that same hour. She with me three days later. (We're both quick on that draw at least.)

Together, we shattered my old relationship record of four days, by two weeks and three days and possibly a half, depending where one draws the end-line, which isn't quite as clear as the start. (For those less adept at adding, we were together for three weeks.) A very fine three weeks, for the most part. There were some nastier incidents, all on her end unfortunately, and all even more unfortunately outside my small realm of influence. She was kicked out of her mother's place, and then out of our friend's parent's attic, readmitted and kicked out again. These events aside, we had a great time.

The end was messy though. There was some sex, I was not involved, Brandon was, and friend loyalty lines were drawn which lead to Gretta ultimately making up with her mother and moving back home.

I passed Calculus II with a B, had since completed a piece of chain-mail for my sister and then completed my vest. The last piece I made this summer was a strip, about forty inches long with improvised metal hooks on one end and an actual ring (like, for fingers) woven into it, an effective belt. The ring has special significance, I have in the past, worn it whenever in love. The belt I gave to Gretta as a birthday present, as I had promised to do before we dated. I had to give it well in advance of her birthday, not for seven days yet, as I was leaving for school (the essential reason for the breakup). She seems to like it, which makes me glad.

And here I am, skimming the draft and wondering what else I should probably throw in. Fudge it. I don't feel like writing any more.

Obediently,
Ian Hogan.

Tears

Dear blog,

I cried tonight like I haven't cried in many years.

I walked in on my mother and sister watching Titanic on our ridiculously large television. This put me in mind of one of my favorite scenes. I looked it up on youtube just to listen to the string arrangement of Nearer, My God, To Thee, which I haven't found anywhere else. It can be found here.

I couldn't pin down exactly what did it. There are, in my opinion, a number of tear worthy things to that video. It recalls the horror of people resigned to die or fighting to survive and failing. The music is beautiful. The juxtaposition is heart wrenching. Maybe it was just a trigger for something that has been waiting for years to come out.

As I type, I'm listening again, and still crying. Almost sobbing.

It's just so sad.

-Ian Hogan.

Leben ist nicht Änderung

Dear blog,

Life is not change. I'm still chubby, still bearded, and still too busy to devote significant time to the development of this blog.

However, today is my birthday; I'm now twenty-two.

-Ian Hogan.

Ach du liebur!

Dear blog,

I'm becoming a writer. Prior to last Wednesday the longest thing I had ever written was 2300 words; an early teenage attempt at a novel. I got to chapter four before giving up on it entirely. Prior to last Wednesday I had finished a single short story. It was just under 2200 words and was dominated by a sex scene - so, you know, the climax was handed to me. I have started and not completed about five or six sci-fi short stories. Rarely making it beyond a page of text.

Since last Wednesday I have been working on another novel. I have twenty one chapters and eight thousand words as of tonight. About two thousand are old essays and poems that I am incorporating into the plot and about one thousand are character sketches, chapter titles and *'s that I have been using to mark divisions within chapters. Considering that, it is still almost three times as long as anything I've ever written in my life, and there are no signs of slowing down.

Chapter four is complete, if subject to minor revision at a later date. For your reading pleasure:

The Dream

Towering serpentine body rising out of the sea, preparing to plow downward to the deck. I could only gape up at it, immobilized by fear.

(optics)

“No!” someone screamed. The snake was gone. “Fire arrows just in case! Volley on my mark! FIRE!” I grabbed my bow, wondering where the draw-cord was. Aha! I thought. This is a boomerang not a bow. Drawing it back across my body I prepared to fling with all the force I could muster.

(humour)

Seeing it sail through the air I felt satisfied. A hand clasped on my shoulder as it finally splashed in the distance. “You idiot,” he said. “Those were the drugs.” I nodded and smiled, still satisfied. They threw me overboard.

* * *

Our band of mighty warrior-sailors were back in the game, traveling through a cave. Here, stone like chocolate pudding, dark brown and smooth ripples, morphing easily into the floor. Deeper in! I knew not what we sought, deeper though I went. Brown puddings turned to ice, blue glass, rippling until it shattered; jagged edges, array of knives.

(marmalade)

Great, tall oak doors with brass handles all across my field of vision. Through! On deeper in, past the gate, I knew not where to. Into a hall, towering high, Dutch architecture. Who are the Dutch? I wondered.

“Be quiet, they are the Dutch,” he said, and I accepted.

Through the hall, my warrior-band long gone and forgotten. A smaller gate, the back way. Through! Onward and downward, I knew not where. Stairs down, red cloth and a reflecting pool at sunset. A reflecting pool outside the hall of the Mountain?

“It had been an opera hall you know. The stage was the favorite place for men of the evening (Aye, men, not ladies) to laze about their business. They never made much money.”

(haze)

Silence. I pleaded, please silence, turn down that glare, I beg you. I’m sleeping you know. Sleeping and dreaming, I know; Should this be? I should sleep – I must be awake.

* * *

What have I done?

Dear blog,

At the behest (thinly veiled command) of my professors I just enrolled in the honors program in my college and have forms ready to apply for honors credit in two of my courses, calculus and multicultural education. Between those two, if I succeed, I will get seven credits at the honors level.

The program requires that I take two two-credit "colloquiums" and a three credit thesis course (fourteen credits once I do those) and that I earn at least twenty credits at the honors level (do the math people, just two more three credit courses to complete). If I succeed in everything, I will graduate with honors, get one of those stupid tassels to go with my "gown" like the prigs in high-school had, and an indication on my degree.

This isn't cool. I'm not an honors student. I work my ass off in all my classes and this is how I'm repaid!? I'm outraged.

Ian Hogan.

That blog with the title...

Dear blog,

Confined to this cell without provisions, company or internet access, I am forced (or allowed, as the reader desires to perceive) to compose an update for this blog. The basic process of my life relating to this blog is simple enough. A change occurs, leading to instability, followed by re-equilibrilating and stability wherein I write about the change and post to this blog. It has been such a long time since the last post because such major changes have been happening and at such a frequency that the re-establishment of the equilibrilized state has been hindered. (In other words, I’ve been busy.)

(If you can’t tell, I’m a bit bored.) They say never to open a paragraph with a parenthetical, (fuck ‘em). (Close it too with those bent vertical bars, if ye be of stout tendons and wiry beers. To the beers…)…

Over the last month I have passed through at least two and possibly more rites to adulthood. Major changes, and inevitable changes, supporting the title of this blog. Trials of pain. Tests of independence (some would call it responsibility. I hate that cliché). The social pinnacle of order…enough of my euphemisms.

For twenty one years, eight months and twenty-six days I was sexually abstinent. It was a good run. I’m starting another as of December 21, 2007. I highly doubt this next run will approach the length of the last, a lot of (evidently blind) girls think I’m cute. This doesn’t rank all that high on the wall-o-accomplishments but warrants an honorary mention on the chart of “becoming a man” (I hate these clichés!) The reason I don’t rank it that high is because it was just four hours of fun. What follows is something somewhat different.

I moved out.

So innocent sounding, so brief. Three little words, nonchalant, inconspicuous. Those things in my favor: A while back I disposed of the majority of my possessions, leaving only clothing, books, this computer, my guitar and a few nick-knacks (a slide-rule, tokens, bits of jewelry &c); and I only had to move two hundred miles.

The odds and ends are all stored in a very small space in my parents’ attic until such time as I can ferret it off to a more permanent abode. The rest came with me, and fit in my tiny car without obscuring any mirrors (on that last count I am extremely proud, not just in my lack of things, but in my ability to sort them in such a way as to maximize safety). However, it still probably weighs four hundred pounds, combined with my near three hundred drove my car to a hearty shaking whenever I went uphill or exceeded fifty miles an hour. Thus a three and a half hour trip, that could have been made three even by speeding, became a four hour trip, during which I would not have been surprised if my engine had melted. (Note to self, this thing will never make it to New York.)

Orientation at Central State University started at eight AM. Other people from Cleveland got up at two and drove down that morning. They are all writing their respective blogs about trials of pain. I left at TEN PM on the third, and arrived at TWO AM on the fourth. Cue trial of boredom and freezing feet, getting sleepier and sleepier until right when I might have fallen asleep, orientation began. It was fifteen degrees that night. I sat in my car from arrival until eight, and I must say, things really picked up around five thirty when a few cars started going down the road behind me, visible in my mirrors. (Again glad that I didn’t stack things up to block them.) Then registration, counseling services, three hours of presentations, two and a half hours of waiting in line for financial aid, an hour of waiting in assorted other lines to be assigned a room, to get a school ID card, and everything else necessary to be squared away for class on the seventh. All processes lumped together with all staff on deck for convenience. (A good theory at least.) Squaring off a great time, I got to take all the stuff out of my car that I had just put in the same day (relative twenty four hour period unbroken by sleep), and carry it into my new room. When I was done, I had been awake for twenty four hours, and crashed. (Secondary note to self, purchase monitor that weighs less than sixty pounds.)

But, I’m in. I’m registered for classes, I have paid for tuition (have deferred payment for tuition). Only sent an eight hundred dollar bill to my parents, and should I manage to pay that off soon, I can call myself independent, ergo fully adult (oh those little hang-ups, if only growing up were a discrete process). Hopefully this place is desperate enough for tutors that they’ll hire a dope like me.

I don’t want to take stock in my life right now. It would fit nicely, a full accounting of all rites of passage taken care of as of now, but I kind of just want to sleep until class begins. A brief overview in lieu; I turned eighteen, I purchased a cigar, smoked some of it, I voted, I killed a raccoon with my car (not as a rite, it was dark and I couldn’t swerve fast enough), I got a job, I kept a job, I purchased a beer and left it on the counter, I grew a beard, I had sex and I moved out.

Signed in the last minutes of the fourth of January, 2008, awaiting internet set up before posting,

Ian Hogan.

Post Script, got a camera for Christmas. Here are the “move” pictures.

(Ok, pictures will be posted in an addendum. The connection here is maxing out on text uploads.)

Really, the whole thing is just a note to myself. I think that I might be very curious about how I felt about this when it happened in the future.