writing challenge

Daily Prompt: In Things We Trust

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 12 asks, “Machines, appliances, and gadgets sometimes feel like they have their own personalities—from quirky cars to dignified food processors. What’s the most ‘human’ machine you own?” (I wrote a piece that touched on this earlier; this question gave me a chance to add some more thoughts to it.)
__________________________________

In “The Li’l Guys,” I wrote that I believe some of my writing utensils are friends and some can not be trusted:

“I have a superstitious nature, something that I am loathe to admit to. Place two identical pens before me, give me a day or two to use them, and I will declare one a favorite, and the other? I will have held it perhaps once, but I will have felt something about it frustrating or ‘wrong,’ and left it alone. From then on, forever. I buy replacement pens even though I own many pens and have not been without a pen in decades. (The Zebra F-301 or G-301 model, for completeness’ sake. Black ink, 1.0 mm point size.)

“Pencils, too. I am probably the ideal Blackwing 602 customer, but I like money more. A 12-pack of the pencil will set a customer back approximately $20. That is a lot of money for a dozen pencils, eight of which I might very well ignore for forever in my writing tool superstition. So even though I have held a Blackwing 602 only one time so far in my life and I drooled over its swift action on the page, I have not purchased a set and I tell myself that it is because these are knockoffs made by a company that bought the naming rights and not the classic pencils themselves. Those, the original ones, pop up on eBay with an asking starting bid of $100 for two pencils. Yes, unused.”

(This listing is current as of September 12, 2014.)

If you ever hear about me spending more than one hundred dollars cash money on a pair of pencils, a couple dramatic changes must have happened in reality that you will have to bring me up-to-date about when you see me do this. First, wealth must have happened to me. Because if I have spent fifty bucks per writing device, the inner cash register that is always ringing in my head must have been disconnected. I had better be able to sell everything written or doodled or listed on a piece of paper written by my hands with one of those pencils clutched in it. I had better be able to find a cash buyer willing to buy the shavings in the sharpener from those pencils. Nothing can go to waste.

Second, the only way I could purchase those pencils would be if something else was disconnected in my mind: the thought that some pens or pencils work for me and some do not work for me, out of the same pack. The thing I confessed above. It is one thing to spend a few dollars on a bag of pens or a few more on a pair of Zebras, and discover that one pen is instantly my favorite and it gets used for everything while the rest sit unused forever in my desk, but what if I discover that neither of these $50 pencils “works” with me, does not “feel right.” This would be tragic, unbearably sad.

So I ascribe things like motives and intentions and feelings to inanimate objects like pens, pencils, and notebooks. Thus, I usually think of the world of machines as one in which I must fend for myself and keep looking for friends where I can find them. It is one thing to find the right pen, the pen that will be a partner for life while you ignore the rest from the same pack, but it is another to buy the “wrong” computer or big-ticket item. I have purchased the wrong computer and regretted it:

“My writing implement superstition has reared its head in my life with computers, though, sad to say for my wallet. At this point, it would take me longer than you have available for me to recount the number of computers, laptops, and handhelds I have owned. (I loved the Treo 90 and owned a half-dozen over the years, some of which felt right and some of which did not.) Some computers I became attached to like a beloved typewriter, others were only employed to go online and make sure I was still alive when I discovered that typing on them just didn’t ‘feel right.’ Four years ago I purchased a full-sized laptop on which I tried to write a book. Either the keyboard was built too sensitively or I typed on it like an orangutan, but it no longer produces the letter C. (One of the top 13 letters in our alphabet.) When the briefly popular Netbooks came out (the era lasted approximately six months in 2006), I bought an Acer. Upon learning that the full-size machine was resistant to writing, at least any words that needed the letter C, I returned to the Acer and discovered I was making more progress on that book project. It sat, happy to be employed, on top of the full-size laptop.”

One laptop, in a spiteful fit of pique, even started to shed keys on me, to prevent me from writing on it any longer: The backspace key came off. I could not correct anything. Everything I wrote had to be the final draft. It knew I did not like anything that I was writing on it anyway, so it took matters into its own hands. Like many of the pens in my desk that are still full of ink, my many very sharp and long pencils with clean erasers, and the composition books on which I have only written the date, it knew that I was never going to compose the Great American Anything with it. I no longer have that laptop, but I still have its backspace key, somewhere, to remind me to make friends with my tools.

Daily Prompt: Voices in My Head

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You should be on the radio.”

I have heard this sentence from childhood, when my voice suddenly and without the typical teenager pitch shifts and volume wobbles—the “Peter’s voice is changing, this week on a very special episode of ‘The Brady Bunch'”-type changes—deepened and thickened to a baritone/bass. In the past, I blamed this on doing theater starting in junior high school, as that school did not have a stage at all and my high school theater did not have a sound system, so I learned at a young age how to project my voice and fill a big room without sounding like I am yelling. I now realize that this theory, like many of my theories, makes approximately no sense.

“You should be on the radio.”

A woman behind me on line said it to me a few days ago. She did not even say hello, which is usually how this moment transpires: A stranger hears me speak and tells me that I sound like an announcer. Some ask if they have heard me on the radio. (This is possible, but not likely.) Some suggest I send a recording to a radio station.

It is always a compliment and I appreciate it. There is no “but” to follow that sentence, even though it probably sounded like I was about to turn it into a complaint. Compliments are nothing to complain about. When I was younger, I did not know how to take compliments for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height, any more than I knew how to accept insults for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height.

I recently discovered that there are videos online from 1985 of a high school production that I was in. (The fact that the onstage star is currently the husband of a famous television personality is I think why these particular half-dozen are online, as he is the only person in all six clips.) It is a production of Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed …,” which is a musical that must be performed by every high school in the United States once each decade for the school to retain accreditation. (It’s the l-a-w!) Because I can not sing, deep voice or not, whenever my school was producing a musical I had to find any available non-singing roles and make them mine. In this clip, I am the offstage voice of the book that young Finch is reading.

I was 16 and already sounded like, well, like someone who should be on the radio or someone who should be announcing subway stops. Or someone whose job is recording outgoing messages for funeral parlors—that young me sounds so serious, and it is not, I promise, not because of anything the “role” required. He was, sadly, indeed that serious. Well, that is how I remember me at 16. I had a lot on my mind.

My voice now sounds a bit more lived-in. Living will do that. I have a little more control over it. But my girlfriend tells me that she knows when something has my “alpha male” riled up: She says I sound like a radio announcer or the voice of a book when I feel like I need to make my point in a debate. (Not with her; she established long ago with me that she sees through a lot of my quirks and will ignore those that are unimportant.)

So now when someone at the grocery store tells me that I ought to be on the radio, I refrain from making wisecracks about how adults, unlike children, should be heard but not seen or twist it into an insult about how I am being told I have a face for radio. It is a gift, period.

We all hear at least three voices in our heads: our speaking voice as we hear it leave our mouths, our speaking voice as others hear it (when we hear a recording of it), and the voice of anything we read or write. The one voice most people claim they hate to hear is the second one, what our voices really sound like when we hear it. This is no longer the case for me.
__________________________________
The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 11 asks, “Your blog is about to be recorded into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone—from your grandma to Samuel L. Jackson—to narrate your posts, who would it be?”

I suppose my answer to this is me.

Daily Prompt: Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a family with two children, the terms “oldest” and “youngest” are black and white, apples and tornadoes. I am the oldest of two, the older brother who acted like an heir to the throne in high school and then like the off-the-hook kid brother in an extended Peter Pan near-adulthood, both of which must have presented my kid sister with unique challenges.

Family order and the psychological effects of being sibling number one or being sibling number nine is a favorite topic for many commentators simply because we all carry around with us the expertise of being a member of a family. (Being adopted can sometimes make these concerns even more unique or sometimes prove them to be universal, anyway. Being an only child can, too.) I will never know what it is like to be the younger sibling. (There should be a support group for us; I am a member of quite a few already as it is.) My sister will never know what it is like to be the oldest—unless our septuagenarian parents do something rather odd in the near future, such as murder me and then manufacture or otherwise acquire a new child. But my parents are not royals, and my family does not live in a “Game of Thrones”-type world in which something like that might very well happen over brunch next Sunday.

In a royal family, sibling order is truly defining. Sibling number one is the heir to a throne, any throne, and everyone else is tied for not-first. Every person born into a royal system has a job to do that they are born into; the first (and sometimes, only) job requirement is to be born. Not one successful royal on this planet has failed to be born—yet. In well-entrenched royal families, all of the other siblings (and cousins and extended cousins and all the myriad not-firsts, the “soblings”) have duties to perform and fiefdoms to fief over. Each one is number one in his or her own respective well-defined and limited roles and traditions, which usually require them to wear remarkable costumes. And then, in turn, all of their first-borns are the heirs and chief inheritors of whatever their specific fiefdoms include.

In America, the world of Big Business, we sometimes see something similar transpire with corporations and inheritances, but not as often as the soap operas (and the news programs that can seem like soap operas) depict.

Of course, the impending growth of the British royal family, the one that inspired today’s question, would be of no interest to us had it not been for the fact that in 1936 the then-king, Edward VIII, decided to quit and cede the crown to his younger brother. The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9, asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?” Edward VIII’s younger brother could have been an “off-the-hook” kickabout, but, per his royal training, he proved to a quite capable king (whatever that means), George VI. (This is a good thing, as many historians—not some, many—have found and shown evidence that Edward rather liked Hitler and his plans and would not have opposed a Nazi-governed Great Britain. The government under his younger brother appointed him governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of Europe for the duration of the Second World War.) The current royal family is George VI’s; his daughter is the queen and his grandson is the current heir, Charles; William is Charles’ first-born, and since William and Kate have already produced his first-born, the new baby is William’s potential gadabout, layabout, off-the-hook kid royal.

In the House of Aldrich, my not-at-all-royal house, I am the first-born but I spent much of my adulthood as the Failure in Waiting, so I have lived versions of both answers to this question. One of my larger contributions to my sibling’s adult life (she is only two-and-a-half years younger than me, so we have shared many experiences in life and sometimes she has a clearer memory of my life than I have) has been as an signpost warning her against venturing where I did. Perhaps my providing an example of how not to live has been a version of being a dutiful older sibling; now that my life is a bit clearer and happier, perhaps I am filling that role better now.

But we’ll never be royals.

______________________________________
The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9 asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?”