by Kluwe, Chris
Isn’t that the goal of reading a personal story? To get to know the mind hiding behind the eyes more clearly, to forge a bond with something you can’t see and would like to know? It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever meet in real life, spend hour upon hour together learning each other’s hidden secrets, so the only way you can possibly get an inkling of who I am, what my essential humanity represents, is by trying to assemble the outer edge of a jigsaw puzzle in the hope that its outline will suggest the picture within.
I’ll tell you a personal story.
My friend sent me a text message, but before that, we had been talking about a video game that just came out. The game is called Far Cry 3, and it’s a first-person shooter set on a tropical island with lush foliage and abundant wildlife as well as a band of scurvy pirates (all of them wearing red, for some odd reason [pro tip: It’s so you get a subconscious visual cue to pick them out from the complicated backgrounds]) who all want to kill you in a variety of unpleasant ways.
One of the things you can do in this game is hunt the wildlife to get animal skins, which you can then use to upgrade various and sundry items you might need throughout the course of your adventures; it’s not real true to basic taxidermy, but I guess you have to make some allowances for game flow (this is all very essential background information, trust me). There’s a bunch of different wildlife to hunt, everything from dingoes to cassowaries to Siberian bears—a veritable menagerie.
The text message my friend sent me said the following: You would never kill a creature with such an evolved tail.
The reason he sent me this message was that we had been talking about shooting the tigers in the game (of course the game also has tigers; you can’t have a jungle without tigers), and his phone naturally autocorrected tiger to tigger, and I played along with it (as is my wont when noticing the absurd); obviously, I would be hunting Tiggers in jungle paradise (that’s a reference to Winnie-the-Pooh, for any unfortunate souls out there who lacked a Winnie-the-Pooh upbringing).
When I saw his text, my initial reaction was to calmly and logically plan the best way to solve the problem—said problem being hunting a children’s-book companion possessed of a springy, propulsive tail and minimal intelligence—within the constraints of the video game we were both playing and while ensuring maximum odds of success.
One second later I replied with Shotgun. Get him at mid-apogee. Clearly, the best way to draw a bead on such a chaotically moving object is to wait for it to succumb to the natural linear force of gravity, the point where dodging would be impossible, and a shotgun would give maximum stopping power combined with the greatest odds of hitting the target in midair (bear in mind, as a stuffed toy, Tigger does not weigh even a hundredth as much as an actual tiger, so birdshot would work quite well to drop him).
Variables identified, equations balanced, problem solved, all wrapped up in a nice little Eeyore bow, pretty as you please.
I read The Twits as a little kid, along with many other Roald Dahl books, which might go a little way toward explaining my answer. Lying propped up on my elbows on the carpet, getting lost in the worlds of Willy Wonka, Henry Sugar, Matilda, shifting to my side occasionally to relieve the ache of a spine arched for too long.
The pure luxuriousness of reading a book in comfort is one of the greatest sensations in the world (sex is better, but by only a little bit). Curling up on an engulfing couch as snow drifts down outside, toes hidden beneath warm blankets; lying sideways on a cushioned chaise while cool sea breezes gently stir the sunny afternoon air; hiding under the covers with a flashlight while rain beats down outside, all of these anchored by a collection of thoughts and ideas bound together, alone in whatever world the author created. Such hedonistic delight in contemplation of the immaterial, the intangible! File under Satisfaction with Universe.
A personal story concludes. Have we connected, we two packets of information? Do you have a stronger link to me now, another jigsaw piece identified and neatly slotted into place, hints of the larger form taking shape? Do the words I read to you in the silence of your head, narrator conversing with reader—do those words take on different undertones as they spin in the blackness behind your eyes, perhaps a shade more jocular here, a bright splinter higher over there? Or are they darkly sullen, mocking, and worried over like dogs at a piece of meat? Is your perception of me morphing as we carry on our one-sided discussion?
You say you want more personal stories.
I tell you that I have no more personal stories to give.
Every word I write, every thought I put down, every scathing argument and rambling abstraction that fills these pages—they’re all personal, every single one. They’re all reflections of how I think, how I feel, who I am, my conscious and subconscious self trapped in stasis for all to examine via phrase and paragraph, style and structure.
This is my personal story.
This is my mind.
How to Write a Song
I’m in a band. Being in a band is a lot like being married to three people and raising a kid—you all work together to raise a baby, but you all have different ideas on how to go about doing it (pro tip: Don’t let the drummer near anything).
Now, obviously in this case I’m not talking about a literal baby (I feel I have to include that proviso because the world makes me weep some days); in a band, your babies are your songs, and it takes a lot of work to get them to turn out right.
First, you have to start out with a riff of some sort. Usually myself or my guitarist will come in with a little melody we think is catchy and play it for everyone to get feedback. Most of the time, we all agree that this is something we can work with, and we’ll start building the structure of a song.
For whoever brought in the riff, this means playing it over and over and over until his fingers feel like bloody sausages while everyone else tries to figure out a part. It’s a lot like changing diapers. There’s screaming, and there’s jarring noises popping out every now and then, and sometimes the walls get sprayed with dark substances (our singer drinks a lot of coffee and leaves his cups lying everywhere).
Eventually, though, everyone has a part he thinks he likes, and now we can focus on listening to how the parts interact with one another to make a whole. Our band philosophy, and I think it’s a good life philosophy as well, is that everyone has to be happy with every part in the song because otherwise someone’s not going to want to play the song. Compromise and cooperation are the main rules.
Naturally, we tell our drummer to change everything he does. Usually, it goes something like this: “Hey, Matt, can you add, you know, more toms?”
“I’m already playing the toms. I play the toms on every song. All you guys ever do is tell me, Play more toms.”
“Yeah, but if you could do”—vague hand-waving gesture meant to signify brilliant musical drum instruction—“then I think it would really pop.” (Note: Pop is a technical term denoting a nebulous concept of awesomeness that no one’s ever able to specifically define.)
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that.”
Our concerns about the drums thus satisfied, we move on to the bass. I play the bass, and it’s always perfect, so there’s not a lot of work to be done there. Let’s be honest, no one really listens to the bass anyways. The bass is like your kid’s pants—unless you know what you’re looking for, no one has any idea he just crapped himself. He’ll keep smiling and running around like an idiot, leaving people with vaguely puzzled frowns and a general sense of brown notes (that’s a mythical chord that can make someone literally poop his pants if he hears it).
After the bass, we start dealing with guitars. One of our guitarists likes to play notes in a register that only cats can hear, so we just kind of assume he’s in tune with the rest of the song. It’s basically like when your kid goes off to school—you hope he’s doing the right thing, but you know, deep down, there’s some shenanigans going on that will make you wince when you actually hear about them. That’s okay, though, you love him
anyway (except for when he insists on turning the volume up each practice until the only noise in the space is a dental drill for Titans).
Our other guitarist plays mainly rhythm stuff, so he’s basically the day-to-day chores no one notices unless they’re not done. Things like cooking breakfast, picking the kid up from school, making sure bedtime is obeyed—everything that goes into a normal day. We tended to take him for granted until his wife actually had a baby and there was a chance he would miss a show, and everyone was stressed waaaaaaay the fuck out with no idea how to fill in the missing parts. We started practicing “Seven Nation Army” at one point! Madness.
At this juncture, we’ve been working on our baby for two or three hours. This is the functional equivalent of the time it takes for your kid to go from infant to college grad—he’s close to being out of your hair forever and you can finally relax and maybe pass out on the couch, but it’s still just not quite coming together, and the finish line keeps receding farther into the distance (i.e., the eight-year college plan). Tempers are frayed, passive-aggressive insults exchanged, and everyone pretty much feels like shit, but you have to keep grinding away because you want this labor of love to be the best you can possibly make it.
Finally, after all the pain and misery and self-loathing, after all the hard work and effort, someone plays a completely unrelated riff out of nowhere, you write a totally kick-ass song in five minutes, and you all call it a day. It’s nothing at all like you expected it to be, but congratulations. Your baby’s all grown up. And, goddamn, does it rock.
Aliens
I went to observe an alien planet the other day. It was pretty amazing just how strange this place ended up being. Really put things in perspective for me.
First, let me describe their planet. They’re literally living on an explosion; the only thing keeping it from engulfing them is a thin rocky shell. Doesn’t seem very safe, and the only reason they have this shell is that the whole planet is surrounded by absolute freezing cold; makes Hoth look like a cruise ship. They’ve managed to carve out a tiny, tiny niche where they can live, but it’s constantly under siege from the heat and the cold, so they have to constantly adapt to survive. They’ve come up with some mind-boggling stuff to help them achieve this goal.
Now, the aliens themselves, they’ve managed to colonize most of the habitable zones on the planet, and their cities are amazing! They somehow invented a way to defy gravity so as to stack hundreds of thousands of living units on top of each other, extending up to the very sky! And each of these living units contains the most wondrous technology!
I saw devices that held the entire history and knowledge of the species just lying around where anyone could access them. Multiple units had full musical bands playing in their living rooms for free, at concert-level quality. These aliens could control the very elements in their units, and they had access to such abundant resources, they could afford to throw food out every day, spoiled or not, without a care for where more would come from. Honestly, it quite offended me at the time!
To make matters worse, these creatures had plenty of resources to go around, but they still kept trying to kill each other for them, which wasted more resources in the process! It seemed absolutely insane to me; anyone could see that if they just worked in concert, there wouldn’t be a problem, but they stubbornly insisted that their way was working the way it was supposed to. In fact, they even trained their young in how to kill each other. Needless to say, this left me aghast.
When they weren’t busy indoctrinating their young in ignorance and hate, these aliens (whom I was now beginning to rather despise) were quite eager to sacrifice their most able-bodied and intelligent in wars and war simulations, despite the large cost involved. It almost seemed as if they had absolutely no vision beyond their immediate environment, like a leech blindly questing around itself, constantly searching for food, confident that the bounty will last forever.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad—there were some bright spots amid the madness. Quite a few of the creatures would connect through the omnipresent planetary communication network, and they created communities to help one another. Still others would send warnings and alarms when they witnessed something bad happening, and everyone in the whole vicinity would converge on the area to help out. Most of them wanted nothing more than to be left alone in peace; common enough, I suppose.
I would be remiss, though, if I failed to mention the rare few among them who dared to dream. They wondered what was out in the stars, how things worked, what other aliens they might meet (they didn’t know I was among them), what brave new worlds awaited. You would think that these would have been the leaders of this planet, but the aliens (so strange, even still) believed that popularity was the true determinant of competence—they mainly tolerated the dreamers with a pained acceptance. To this very day, I still do not understand why they valued popularity so highly; I can only imagine it must be ingrained into their young at a very early age.
Finally, my time grew short, and I had to leave the crazy little planet and its bewildering inhabitants. I don’t know that a lot of what I saw made much sense, but I know it sure was a learning experience. Hopefully we will never meet those lunatics here!
Bowling
This piece originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in February of 2012. You can find the original online here: http://www.twincities.com/sports/ci_19886914.
The Super Bowl. It is everything. It is the culmination of an entire year’s worth of work for one hundred and six players and their coaches. It is the gladiatorial spectacle writ large, with an entire nation the stage, hundreds of millions of spectators enthralled by sixty minutes of savagery; a chance for three hours to be part of something greater than an individual life. It is a chance for an obscure name to clamber atop the pedestal of greatness, or for a celebrated veteran to ruin a career with one ill-timed drop or errant pass. It is the opportunity to rise above the mundane and the petty and achieve immortality. It is everything.
The Super Bowl. It is nothing. It is the overindulged watching the overcompensated while marketing-company executives rub their well-manicured hands with glee. It is the definition of materialistic consumption, as million-dollar advertisements vie with one another to see who can blare the loudest, bejeweled peacocks and sequined foxes strutting their wares for an insatiable audience drunk with emotion and liquor and too many mini hot dogs (such a steal at only three dollars a box, and, no, don’t ask what’s in them).
The Super Bowl. It is a celebration of life. It is the child who grew up with a blind father and almost had to quit playing football so he could work to support his family now never having to worry about money again. It is the receiver who, despite all odds, was able to fill in at cornerback and make a key play to keep his team in the game. It is the fan who, inspired by his favorite team, found the strength to rise above the miserable conditions at home and become a doctor (or teacher, or mentor) and who is now cheering that team on from the stands. It is that ultimate story of the quarterback no one thought would amount to anything who is now living the Hollywood dream with a supermodel wife and is widely regarded as the best player at his position, and, boy, if you tried to pitch that as a movie script, would you be laughed out of the room.
The Super Bowl. It is the funeral march of despair. It is that same quarterback slowly walking off the field after having come so close to victory only to watch it snatched away by an improbable circus catch, the width of a blade of grass the difference between perfection and an off-season of what-ifs. It is the bitter taste left in the mouth of an entire organization, one some have tasted more keenly than most, to travel so far and walk away with only a consolation Division Champion ring that most would rather melt down than look at, so stinging are the memories. It is the knowledge that on the one day when it mattered the most, at the pinnacle of greatness, you JUST WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH—GET A JOB, YOU LAZY BUM, never mind that those words will echo through your mind long after the light
s are shut down and the last piece of confetti swept away, perhaps to linger the rest of your life. It is the resounding thwack of an angry husband striking his wife, unable to articulate the pent-up frustration and rage he experiences from watching what is, after all, only a game.
The Super Bowl. It is the pathos of the stage on a scale Sophocles could only dream of, a million different story lines all merging and swirling together to form one vast tapestry of drama, comedy, and tragedy; a resonating stillness of chaos that brings the audience and actors alike so close to a transcendental moment that can never be captured, only experienced. It is the shining instant of perfection, but it is not guaranteed, never guaranteed, you have only the chance to participate, and is it any wonder that it happens on a Sunday.
The Super Bowl. It is the ultimate dichotomy, a celebration of socialist equality amid the thunderous roar of a capitalist juggernaut, a dance that any team can attend with that promiscuous belle of the ball Advertising. It is our society, our culture, our America. It is the gloriously triumphant epitaph that will one day adorn our tombstone of decadence, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
It is the Super Bowl.
Rage
I need to stop reading Vonnegut. Every time I read one of his books, I feel like he’s saying everything that I want to say, and he wrote a lot of them before I was even born. Lying politicians doing their best to get us all killed, sociopathic citizens wrapped up in their own stupid little worlds, people who want to do the right thing but can’t because the rich and powerful are too seldom among their number.
Rage.
That’s the only emotion that comes to my mind, because it’s the only sane reaction to have. How else are we supposed to deal with our society? We tell poor people that it’s their own fault they’re poor, because if they were good enough to be rich, then they would be rich, and that’s accepted as normal! We have rich people who lie and cheat and steal to make an extra million dollars when they’re already worth more than 99 percent of Americans will make in their lifetimes, and that’s accepted as normal! We proclaim that our government is guided by the benevolent hand of God as we rain missiles and bombs down on other countries from unmanned drones, which we’re designing to be able to pull their own triggers, and that’s accepted as normal! Praise Jesus and pass the Predator controls!