This isn’t a new idea of mine, you see, as I have been thinking about it since high school, but what if I started a lit journal? Nowadays, it would be an online lit journal, but in the back of my mind I can hear M.M. Carrigan over at Taco Bell Quarterly yelling that I should just do it.
And I might…
But that’s not why I am here. (Though I could always use the unsolicited encouragement.) The reason I bring all of this up is that, besides figuring out what the mission of the lit mag would be (It needs to be original, like, the only place to get whatever it is that I will showcase,) but most importantly is to come up with a name that stick in people’s minds, and encapsulate whatever it is that I am selling. Now, logically, I need to come up with the mission or purpose statement first as that will make it so much easier to find a name… Yeah, but that’s not a whole lot of fun.
What I am reminded of is when I was in a terrible, just awful punk/blues/jam band, and all the hours in rehearsal we’d spend rockin’ out, and then yelling possible band names at each other;
No Refund, Lost Weekend, Areola, Bacon on the Side, Webbed Toes… You get the idea.
Now, I don’t want to sound too much like a grandpa 90’s punk, but it should still have a literary name, but with an edge… like…
Poochie
Inked Well
The Blurb
Atmost
Humph
Dead Spot
Dead Cart
Mark Two
And then the title might need a good one liner to follow up, like…
“Nothing But Illustrious Writers”
Or
“It’s Norse for Quality”
Or
“Putting Your MFA to Use”
So, you can see, this has been a fun mind walk of an… Oh!
Mind Walk (That’s a good one…)
Anyway, you can see this has been a fun exercise in…
Ellipses (Ah… maybe not…)
Point here people is that making an online lit journal might not be the easiest thing, but picking out a name is a good way to kill an hour of writing time.
(And all these journal names are copyrighted by me, Matthew Groff, 2024. Can’t use it unless you get permission or pay me.)
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Today has been nuts. Even though I got up early and tackled the day, seems like something kept popping up and cornering me from getting to what I wanted to do. That stuff stopping me was my responsibilities to my family.
Like right now, I am on the couch helping my daughter with her homework as she has a big test at school tomorrow. I want to be there for her. I mean, I am here, literally sitting next to her, trying to make sure she understands that I am behind her, support, and believing in her to do well. Because she is working hard, and I want her to know that I see how hard she is working.
But, I am supposed to write everyday, and damnit! That’s what I am going to do.
I did write in my journal this morning, but that’s different.
It’s about the habit; creating the habit, keeping the habit, sustaining the habit… If I don’t put something out, then I feel like I have let myself down.
That’s the point of this post, to make the point that I did something. I didn’t give in and say that I will make it up tomorrow, but I pushed through it, and got it out.
I’m not sure about much anymore. The older I get, the more I understand that I never really understood as much as I thought I did. I thought by midlife, I would have some wisdom and clairity on a few things. Maybe have an insight or two. Really, I know a couple of things.
I know I want to be a good father. I want to be better at it. I want to be dependable, so my daughter knows that I will be there if needed.
And I want to keep the promises I make to myself. If I say that I will post five times a week, then I will posy something five times a week.
So, the week started off bad with the Cowboys choking, but at least the Eagles collapse was a much bigger story. One might say that there was little solace in that fact, but they would be wrong – I really enjoyed watching the Eagles lose to Tampa Bay. I am pissed about the Cowboys, but this will be the last I write about it. Just can’t believe that no one showed up to play on that team. Sure, every year I think they will win the Super Bowl (that’s how I was raised) yet in a realistic sense, I thought for sure they would make it to the Conference Championship, and then lose to San Francisco or Detroit; whoever made it there. But enough of that.
Then my wife hurt her back on Monday. Now, she is one tough woman, and I have been doing my best to comfort her, but there is nothing I can do to take her pain away. It’s a pretty helpless situation to be in, and that goes for both of us. Slowly she’s been getting her mobility back, but it has been rough going. The whole week got shot to hell for both of us, so it feels like we are running behind, too. I know she will be better soon, and we will get thing back on track, but it’s just frustrating.
And then the kid had a big test at school that she was positive that she wasn’t going to do well on. It’s a reading and writing test, and she’s not wrong, she is having trouble with writing her thoughts down. Part of this is left over effects from Covid causing school closings, and this is the educational crack she fell into. And unfortunately, many other kids did as well. I helped her prep for the test this week, and she can comprehend and do the work, but she just doesn’t have much confidence in herself when it comes to the test. This was another place that I felt very helpless this week. I was trying to encourage her, build up her confidence, and I even used sports metaphors about how you have to believe and expect to win first, then put in the hard work to be successful. I don’t know… We haven’t got the results yet on the test, so it’s agonizing waiting to hear how she did.
Finally, to shit out my week, I learned yesterday that a good friend of mine from college died suddenly the night before. There was no warning… they were here and then they weren’t. Logically, it’s been twenty years since I was in college, and unfortunately these things will happen now. That’s a meaningless thing to say because logic in these situations never makes anyone feel better. I hadn’t seen them in close to eighteen years. I hadn’t spoken to them in, like, fifteen years. Hadn’t communicated with them in five, and the last interaction we had was about five months ago when we “liked” each other’s pictures. Just thought there would be one more chance. Like the next time I was in Texas, I would head out to the theatre they worked at, and I would see them. And they would be friendly and kind, and hug, because they were kind. The kindest. They were especially kind to me when I was new in the theatre department, and didn’t know anything. They were kind to help me then, and as I see the tributes on social media, I am hearing again about their kindness, and how wonderful they were to everyone.
I’m guessing here, but I’ve written close to 100 reviews for my blog. And when I write one, I try to come up with some catchy opening, or hook, or gimmick in the first paragraph to get you, the reader, interested in reading further. The reason I do this is mainly because that’s how I was taught to write essays and critical papers in high school and college. Effective? Yeah, sure. Original? Not really. (Now, watch how I do this.) “Chance the Cat” is such a story that has a hook, a gimmick as one would say, that David Means employees to tell his story.
What “Chance the Cat” really is, is a deconstructed bittersweet rom-com with a cat and a Secret Service agent, which employees the gimmick of starting each section/paragraph by asking “Does it matter…” or stating “What mattered was…” or some other variant of the aforementioned questions/statement. Of the 49 section/paragraphs, only 5 do not use this hook. There must be a reason for this, right? Those 5 parts must contain some weight to them, because dramatically, when a pattern is created in the narrative, inevitable it will be broken for effect. I am not faulting Means for this structure in his storytelling, merely identifying it.
I bring all of this up because, as I said earlier, the story is a com-com. There is a meet cute, a budding relationship, a jointly cared for cat, a break up, and then the melancholy remembrance of the time shared. There are jumps in time, as the story doesn’t follow a linear format, which works well with the bittersweet tone of the story. I enjoyed how the story played with how disparate people come together, the crutch they use to stay together, in this story the cat, and how as time passes, it still isn’t clear how one should deal with those emotions from that time together. Using the “Does it matter…” “What mattered…” gimmick plays very well into that theme.
Did I mention the Secret Service agent? Yeah… this is the only issue I had with the story. (Well, it was a little long in parts…) You see, this couple lives down the street from the Obama’s in Chicago, and as such, there are Secret Service agents on the block checking people who live there as they come and go. Being that this information is essential to the breakup and the climax to the story, I found it an odd decision to share this with us about 2/3 way through the piece. A good amount of time is spent on this agent, whose purpose in the narrative is only to annoy the guy so he loses the cat. That’s it. The agent doesn’t weigh on the girl’s mind years later, nor is there some sort of connection between the girl and the agent, which I thought would happen as it would play into the complication of the central relationship. That was just me hoping for something to justify the agents existence.
I try very hard not to impose what I want to see happen in a story, but only to analyze and critically examine what the writer has presented to the reader. I kind’a fudged this one. In my defense, except for one character choice, I did enjoy “Chance the Cat.” I enjoyed the structure David Means created to tell this story, and there are many details that layered and deepened the central characters. But that agent…
(And then I got an anonymous comment this morning telling me that the story was about race, and how it was mind boggling that I could miss that. At first I left a quip about boggling minds, thanked the person for their comment, and asked what they thought the Agent represented.
I went about my day, but that comment kept poking at the back of my head. Was the story all about race? Could that be right? And if that was true, did I honestly completely miss that?
So, I went back and reread the story… and I took a whiff on this one.
And I’m embarrassed by that.
Rereading the piece, I now see what I missed and glossed over. Especially William’s reaction to the agent stopping him.
Something still doesn’t sit right with me when it comes to this story. I will stick with my original reaction of the Obama’s being down the street, along with the introduction of the Agent, 2/3rds of the way through the story. That Agent and all of his passages still feel odd to me; not fitting in with the rest of the flow of the story.
But I think the bigger question in all of this, is why did I whiff so hard on this piece? What I wrote in the last paragraph of my original review reveals everything, and shows my mistake. As I reread the piece, I began to discover how I had errored; I didn’t critically analyze what David Means presented, but started to impose in my mind what I wanted the story to be and glossed over what didn’t fit in with my judgement. I got caught up in thinking I knew better. That was my mistake. I want to own up to, and promise to do better.
Also, I want to thank the anonymous commenter who did an appropriate job of smacking me upside the head.)
Up where I live in Harlem, we got little over an inch of snow overnight and this morning. Besides the fact that snow is fun, the other big story with the snow is that this storm snapped the 701-day streak of New York City not receiving at least an inch of snow. Seriously, we have nearly gone two years without any real snow in New York. You know, because the climate is changing.
It’s funny how in my twenty years in New York, I have witnessed the climate of this place turned on it’s head. Maybe not “funny,” but like “ironic-sad?” No, that’s not correct either. More like, “Depressing-Tears-of-a-Clown” kind’a funny. There we go; that’s accurate.
When I moved up here, there was snow in November. That first winter, it sleeted on Valentine’s Day, and was so cold that the sleet froze and iced the City for five days. We’d get snow like rain showers, and added on top of that, at least two blizzards a season. And it would be cold enough that snow/ice wouldn’t melt for weeks. That feels like a million years ago, and fairy tale of Winters-Gone-By.
It’s also true when it comes to Spring and Fall. May used to be an amazing month in the City. It would only get up to 70 at the warmest, nothing below the 50’s at night, and each day of the month it would incrementally get warmer. Everything would start blooming, grass came back to life, and the skies would be just the bluest. September was equally amazing; just like May but in reverse. A slow slide into Fall – You would start the month in shorts and end in a sweater. Now, May and September are bi-polar, raging between too hot and too cold. The gradualness of these months are gone.
Sure, you could dismiss me as the old guy yelling at a cloud, but the weather facts back me up. It’s warmer and the inclement weather is more erratic. The world is changing, and I at least have enough faith that humanity will be able to adapt, but I’m not so sure on solving this problem. I fear we may never go back to the way it was.
Ung…
This went a little darker than I wanted.
Look I wanted to end with the idea that most likely, I’m going to go sledding with the kid after school, because snow is still fun. Especially to kids and middle-aged men who grew up in Texas and never had any winter weather to play in.
