"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt pt. 2

This was written before my novel actually found a plot, by means o f trip to New Orleans in 1998, with Whiskeytown's Stranger's Almanac a constant companion.

Its' an attempt at a fictionalized (somtimes extremely) memoir that left room for improvement and progress.

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I’m standing inside my apartment, on the 12^th of May 2003., seeing how this moment led to the next like the decaying footprints from last monsoon season that still hang in the now dried mud of the garden.

My wife has just left, (for the weekend) and I have an inclination to walk down the street to the gym. It’s a nice day, so I waltz down there, in that innocent, doe-eyed way that people do when they’re in love and cant believe that their life is about to become unwound again.

I see her, still in town, in Portland, when she’s supposed to be in Bend visiting relatives. I’m about to say hi until I see him and the way that they kiss, lock lips, and the way their eyes focus in on each others corneas, not afraid to hide anything.

They’ve been sleeping together. She gave me that look when we were first together, in the biblical sense of the word.

Standing there, holding flowers just bought from the florists next door. Standing there feeling like the biggest chump. I duck into the nearby alley. And I feel the whole thing unwinding like it did that day with the Yogi.

And that’s why this is chapter one, because after that moment, it was like I could never believe in anything again. Because if I did believe, something would come along and destroy my image. My paradigm smasher would come the moment I thought I was being too paranoid, discounting any sense of faith.

I started this novel because I had the question: “How can we believe in the unreal?” Must we always start out believing that things will be perfect only to see them drift away the way relationships do?

The way my first period class, at the beginning of the school year behaves perfectly, and I believe in the power of teaching, and pat myself on the back upon returning from school, having warm thoughts about student achievement and the great job I’m doing, only to have it unravel before the next few weeks. Unwinding over the hoops, ladders, slings and arrows of the next sixteen weeks before the trimester ends and a new class emerges; ready to do the whole thing over again.

The way that a new mother in law is perfect, and your image is perfect in their eyes, until they catch you with a cigarette at a long party on a gorgeous summer evening on a beach, after dancing and mojitos.

You’re standing there, feet still in sand, and the whole thing comes apart. Relations won’t quite be the same after that; there isn’t really a way to go back. The impression has been destroyed, like a china plate at a Greek Ouzo Bacchanal.

I’m trying something new here, an attempted belief in the power of fiction. In trying to write a novel about an imaginary character that sees the same thing becoming unwound, but not at such an immediate and intense degree. Will reality itself come apart in my attempt to exorcise myself from the character I’ve created?

Because the character is not me, really it isn’t. It’s someone who falls in love harder than I do. He stumbles and falls at greater frequencies than I do. His mistakes are catastrophic while mine are merely annoying.

My (and I mean the person writing this, for the person is not me and I am not the person) belief in the Unreal is dependent upon my character’s belief in the unreal. Of living life for a whole year, day to day, three hundred and sixty five days of them in an attempt for just one year to belief in the unbelievable potential of man for just one year, keep a straight face for that long. Granted my days and years will alter somewhat, offering an uncomfortable trip through the back pages of the characters mind. It’ll be like yearbook day, only harder and it will last for hundreds of pages.

It won’t be easy, but we’ll get started, right away in the present. We won’t start on January 1^st, but on the fist of November on the day after Halloween.

November 1^st – The day after Halloween

All Hallow’s eve has bestowed upon the soggy crags of the Pacific Northwest a torrent of rainfall. Highway tracks are gutters of bountiful water, and I spray around heading north on highway 205, gunning my white shark (with all appropriate apologies to the late Hunter S. Thompson) all the way into Vancovuer.

With daylight savings time ending, I can believe in that, in the improbable beginning chapter of this my first official novel (second if we include that one about the fish and the microscope and the concurrent invention of the telegraph while Samuel Gompers yelled about getting his wooden teeth back from the grave of George Washington, and how grave robbing isn’t going to sell any books, but wasn’t that kind of half the point?) in the unabashed glories of Daylight Savings Time: An extra hour of sleep, a lighter morning.

There’s something in the sky that reminds my paranoid side that this is morning, and the strange vibes crossing the border gives me is no different this morning. And the radio clucks on about Bush’s new appointee and it all gets lost in the miasma of rain, and journalistic embellishments.

And even though my deadline for believing in the unreal started last night at midnight, I couldn’t help but believe in the power of Halloween as well, even if the premise was weak and ill-observed.

But on the way to work this morning I can believe in Daylight savings time, and in the opposites. Maybe this marathon of faith and radiant positivity is all about spin. It works for politicians after all. I hear them on my radio, making excuses, shifting blames and passing the buck. They make it look so easy, I’m sure I could do it for myself.

The day passes with little flair, witnessing the slow unraveling of that class that used to be so good, believing in the power of my peers while witnessing their simultaneous meltdowns. Ok, I’ve found another belief I can believe in, my own naïve notions. Even though I see these notions destroyed everyday, I can believe in the destruction of these incomplete notions, founded only be text books and novels, not yet practices, tested and approved in the arena of the real world.

And most of all I believe in lunch!! It comes after two classes, two classes that feel like hammers on your brain when you are a little dehydrated.

I flirt with the occasional teacher, extending out my fantasies. Hey, I can believe in that.

But I’m turning this, my debut novel into a sort of reality-based televisual feast, instead of a stern belief that the world is not inherently evil, but good. Not rotten to the core, but golden in its innocence, even if the outer-layer of it is contemptible.