Insomnia

By SJ Hopkins. Visit him on deviantart: http://shopkins.deviantart.com/

By SJ Hopkins. Visit him on deviantart: http://shopkins.deviantart.com/

Life is strange. I’ve inadvertently become a night dweller. Last night, I stared at my computer screen until it was 7 a.m., and laid down to sleep when the early rays of the sun were just beginning to emanate across the sky.

I don’t know why I did this, other than because.

I get tired, but something tells me not to go to bed. I desire to stay up and watch one more youtube video or one more twitch stream or play one more game of League of Legends or one more dungeon in A Link Between Worlds. It’s not any individual thing. Something in me wants to stay up late.

All my friends say the same thing is happening to them. They have nocturnal sympathies.

Is it the consequence of being an overworked college student home free over winter break, with no obligations to wake him up in the morning? An unfulfilled life in the day? A desire for the quiet privacy, the warm darkness of night?

I’m not sure. I’m going to bed.

Two-Color Drawings

Start with a line.

IMG_01731Then add another line.

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And another, and another, and another, and keep going, until you’ve found something.

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It’s someone turning away from you, with sloppy wet hair and an umbrella. Don’t see it yet? Then pick a segment and color it. This character is feeling blue (it is, after all, raining, but she doesn’t know that yet), so start with blue.

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Now on every vertex of that segment (every place where it comes to a sharp point that border on another section), go and color that bordering section blue, too.

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Ah. It’s growing. Keep going.

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See the sphere? How’d that get there? And why has this worked every time so far? Why don’t we ever get two sections bordering each other of the same color?

. . .  Let’s keep going.

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It’s colored itself, with no mistakes. How? The secret is that there were no intersections where more than two lines intersected. As long as that’s true in the initial drawing, this always works – it’s been mathematically proven. And it magically always seems to produce incredibly cool and expressive pictures, but perhaps that’s more a testament to the human imagination. Art and math, working together. Huh.

Wait, didn’t I say she was holding an umbrella? Of course! It becomes much clearer once the coloring is finished. She may be feeling blue, but she also has some hope; the rain makes her happy. So she’ll also be green.

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Still don’t see the rain?

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The Sacred Space, Part III

Alexander’s hands shook. The huge golden statues within the sacred chamber towered over him, casting down stoic, stony gazes. He sat cross-legged before the host, and breathed heavily. He could’ve sworn he heard Mikhail open the door ten, twenty, thirty times, but each time, he craned his neck over his shoulder and saw nothing. After a while he couldn’t shake the feeling that an ugly insect of ghost was hovering just behind his back, and he began to look behind himself compulsively.

“I’m sorry it has been so long since your last practice, Sasha,” Mikhail said, appearing in front of him after he glanced over his shoulder for the last time. “I’ve been . . . preoccupied.”

“It’s okay master,” he said. Alexander wished he could say more, for now was one of the times where he felt deep respect for Mikhail instead of frustration, but he didn’t know how to articulate anything else that he wished to say.

“This time, I will begin the chant, but you will end it without me.”

“Yes Master.”

Alexander got on his knees and kissed the floor. He could smell the odor of bare feet ingrained on the carpet. Mikhail did the same, kneeling down beside him and kissing the floor. A deep, throbbing note filled the air. Alexander thought of it in his mind’s eye as a deep swampy green. Then, another layered over it, this one a light and misty blue, and then a third note, just a dash darker, and fourth, darker still, until the notes were pure and flat black, and they climbed again. He caught the melody, and repeated it.

The deep chants echoed in the chamber, clashing in mid air. Some wrestled as they met, and others passed by like ghosts in the woods, drifting silently on their own. The polyphony built and built, and Alexander chanted deeper, and higher, and lower, and fuller, and the world shrunk to the size of the palace, then to the size of his body, and his eyes burst open and he shook his head violently and shut his mouth. The echo of the tones slowly faded away, and by the time they did, Mikhail had clothed Alexander in a blanket.

“I was not able to do it,” Alexander said.

“It’s okay Sasha.” Mikhail helped him to his feet, and as Alexander had done many times before for him, Mikhail supported him. “I’ve been having trouble, too.”

Alexander looked into his Master’s eyes. Mikhail had always been old – he was an old soul – but never before did his eyes look so profoundly ancient to Alexander. His thin eyebrows, his drooping eyelids, the sleepless red-blue bags beneath his irises.

“Nine days,” Alexander said. “They are nine days from here, the invading forces.”

Mikhail sighed. “I know.”

“. . . Master?”

“Yes Sasha?”

“Why did you choose the priesthood?”

“Sasha, that is not a question you should be asking.”

“Do you believe their junk? Will this do anything?”

Mikhail could taste the sour wine on his lips, visualize the Czarina-to-be sitting in a chair chatting with the Czar, pulling strings.

“Sasha . . .” his voice betrayed him. He wanted to show his heart to his pupil, to let him know that with each passing day he saw less and less in his incantations, that soon he would be seeing nothing, that he was worried, that the church weighed heavy on his heart, that he sincerely questioned if his life in service was worth anything at all. But he said none of this to Alexander. Instead, he took a deep breath, and said “Sasha, you must believe. That is our one job.”

They plopped down in the reading room. There were no pastries for Alexander, but there was a fire. Poorly made – no teepee – but a fire, nonetheless.

“Master,” Alexander said, gazing deep into the heart of the fire, “I think I should join the army. I’d be of more use there.”

Mikhail bowed, and shuffled his way out of the room. “That is your choice to decide, my Sasha.”

The Sacred Space, Part II

“They’ve made it past Grestin,” the Czarina-to-be said, and twirled the liquid still in her wine glass until it formed a small whirlpool. That always entertained her. “Nine days.”

She was an elegant woman – certainly not from this country. She preferred to wear the more rigid and and jewelry-spangled dresses of her home, not the loose flowing clothes that the royalty here wore. It made her stick out like a diamond in a heap of coal. She was refined – spoke elegantly, rarely stumbled, good posture. Demanded attention when she entered rooms, argued when she knew she could win. Nothing at all like the Czarina.

“You must have faith, Emilia,” said the Czarina. “Mikhail has been chanting every day, three times a day. He will know what to do soon.”

Emilia scowled at the Czarina. “Why do we need him to tell us what to do? You rule this country for a reason -”

“My husband rules this country -”

“No, you and your husband rule this country, your highness, and just because he believes that a priest chanting every day will solve all of our problems doesn’t mean it in fact will.”

There was a knock on the door of the reading room. The Czarina-to-be, always acutely aware of etiquette, let the Czarina stay sitting as she strolled over and opened the door. Standing on the other side was Alexander, holding a tray of cream-filled pastries.

“Hello young master Alexander. To what occasion do we owe these pastries?”

“These are supposed to be for Mikhail. He’s chanting,” said Alexander. He was the same height as the Czarina-to-be, and he looked into her eyes. For most who gazed into those black pools, there was either contempt, or nothing. But Alexander always found some shred of respect, hidden deep at the back of cornea, and when he saw that, he made sure to reciprocate. “But he never eats more than a few, so you can have some,” he said, smiling and raising the tray. “I’ll put them down on the table.”

The Czarina-to-be smirked and let him in. He placed down the tray on the night-stand beside the chair the Czarina sat in, and wandered over to the unlit fire place, where he began kindling.

The Czarina was downtrodden. “There is no reason to doubt Alexander -”

Alexander looked over his shoulder and at the Czarina. She realized her mistake.

“Oh – sorry Sasha, my apologies. I was speaking of the Czar. My husband.” Alexander went back to making the fire.

He tuned out the rest of the conversation, focusing instead on arranging the wood as best as he could to burn as long as it could. He liked setting it up in a tent-formation, leaning all the different logs against each other to form a teepee. It was fun to watch the moment where the logs, once they were burning, all collapsed inward in a heap. It gave him a reason to watch the fire.

Things had been boring.

Last night, after much pleading, Mikhail relented and said he would give Alexander a practice session today. But this morning, when Alexander asked about it, Mikhail didn’t seem to want to remember. He removed his shirt and entered the sacred chamber wordlessly, leaving Alexander confused and angry. He wanted the wood to burn.

When he had finished making the fire, he returned to the hallway just outside the giant door leading to the Sacred Space, and Molly was sitting there, on the little bench built for those waiting just outside the door.

“Molly,” Alexander said, “What are you doing here?”

She looked up at Alexander with timid eyes. “Well,” she said softly, “I saw no one was waiting here, and I figured I’d just . . . keep an eye on the door until you returned.”

Alexander smiled. When she spoke, she folded her hands gently over her lap and retracted her head as far inward to her body as she could, leaving her bony shoulders poking out.

“Thanks Molly,” he said. She stood up as he sat down. She began slowly to stride away, but stopped only a few paces from the bench, and turned around.

“Alexander? Do you think Mikhail’s incantations will help?”

She bit her lip and looked at him like a child asking if the monsters will get her. It was strange that they were the same age, but only logical for her to be scared.

“Of course they will help,” he lied. “That is our job, right?”

She sadly smiled. “Of course. Of course.” She scurried away, red-cheeked.

Alexander closed his eyes and listened to the faint rhythm of incantation escaping from the chamber. It was a slow and mournful incantation this time. Mikhail dragged out the notes as long as he could, but enunciated them sloppily, only wishing to cry something, but nothing in particular. The melody progressed slowly in arcs, building and building as he raised his voice higher, then becoming softer and simpler as he chanted the low, low notes. And so the chant went on like a lazy river, winding and building and ceasing, but never rushing.

At last, the sounds ceased, and Alexander pushed open the big door. He found Mikhail collapsed on his back, breathing slowly with his eyes closed, looking almost dead, from the whiteness of his face. He put a blanket on him and raised him to he feet. The walked together to the hallway.

“Sasha, Sasha, you must have a practice soon,” he said. “Tonight.”

Alexander’s heart leaped. At last.

When Alexander sat him down in the big chair in the reading room and offered his pastries, the Czarina had left and the Czarina-to-be was still twirling the wine in her glass, looking forlornly out the window. He wondered how the conversation had ended.

“Old man,” she said to Mikhail, “How goes the chanting?”

Mikhail coughed, and chewed his pastry for a long minute. “As always, I saw everything and nothing.”

She scowled. “You don’t really believe this will make a difference, right?”

Alexander normally would’ve expected a careful smile from his mentor’s face, and a return of ‘”why not?”, or some other affirmation of faith. He would’ve normally expected Mikhail to be calm and collected in criticism, the see all skepticism not as evil, but as a chance to teach someone in faith. But when the Czarina-to-be said this, Mikhail just frowned, furrowed his eyebrows, and bit his lower lip. The room, in spite of the fire, froze over.

“We must take action, not sing songs.” The Czarina-to-be gazed straight at Alexander. “Besides, can you really believe in the . . . junk espoused by the church?”

Alexander wasn’t sure how to react, so he did the most monastic thing he could – nothing. The Czarina-to-be, seeing only contempt, or at least confusion among Mikhail and Alexander, put down her wine glass on the pastry tray and left the room.

Mikhail sighed, and finished the wine.

Snow Day, Part 2

I didn’t go sledding – I had the grumpier kind of snow day, where I had to shovel my car out of the snow and deal with the icy, snow-covered roads. I suppose that means I’m an adult now.

It’s strange how a break from the ordinary changes as we grow. To young children, snow is a welcome change – probably as much because it is interesting as because it cancels school, but still. The system being broken pleases them. If the system stayed broken, they wouldn’t be happy with the consequences, but being broken allows them to do just what they want – play.

When you have a job or a social life or college or whatnot, the snow hurts routine. It impedes and says, you cannot do what you planned to. You must live differently for today, and that’s scary, the same way that power outages scare people. Most people, there basic reaction to a power outage is to try and restore power, or find a generator, or run movies off of their computer while it has power. They strive to replace the downed electric lines with the best substitute available. But power outages grant such a massive opportunity to live differently – to force your family to play poker by candlelight when they’d normally never do anything together, or have a nerf war in your dorm hall which would never happen if people has the lure of electronics. Not that I dislike electronics (I love them), but if given the chance to experience the world in a different way, why not?

And so, just like with power outages, with snow, we try to work past it’s hindrance and make everything as normal as can be. Instead of not driving, we shovel our driveways and bail out our cars. Adults rarely sled or have snowball fights or adapt to the sudden shift in environment; the routine has become too strong, too ingrained. I know I generalize, but I don’t generalize with the intent of patronizing. I love routine; it’s comfortable to me. I could’ve sled today, but didn’t, simply because it was too cold. The different disturbs me.

But maybe it should not. Perhaps that is the key to staying young.

Snow day!

Downy flake descends over Wall Township, and the high school cancels classes tomorrow. A snow day.

Snow. Such a beautiful substance. People nostalgize over it. “I remember the snow days of my youth . . . sledding down the big hill right around the corner, then coming home and having hot chocolate. And there was no school!”

People complain over it: “Be careful driving, the roads are icy today from the snow, and they haven’t even cleared some of the roads yet. I shoveled the driveway all morning, my back’s killing me. Can’t the government do the same for the roads?”

It’s entrancing to look upon, especially as it falls. It feels different from rainfall, because it makes no noise. With rain, the patter the fills up the background of everywhere is calming. It reminds you constantly of the rain’s presence. You can tune out and tap into the outside downpour, or if you’re outside, you can close your eyes and feel as if the earth is peeing on you. But with snow, it is much different. When you sit inside your house in your pj’s, you know it is snowing because you have to turn the thermostat up again. Snow is visual. Sometimes rain, when its thin enough, scattered enough, and fast enough, can disappear to the eye when viewed from behind a window. But the same never happens to snow: a quick glance out the window and you’re instantly aware of it’s total dominance of the landscape. It erases the blemishes of grass and vegetation. Snow is the communist’s weather: It equalizes, erases distinctions, boundaries. The high-class roads and lowly grasses are made one beneath a blanket of snow.

Only two weeks ago, I spent an hour bailing my car out of two-foot deep snow, which had surrounded it on all sides. After much struggling, a friendly professional with a snow-blower put his hands on the hood of my car and pushed it, while I sat inside, with the gear in neutral, and steered it free. I escaped the snow. But sometimes it gets you: Nikelia fell on her ass twice when we walked back to my home earlier that same day, because the ice on the walk ways of campus was well-hidden by the white blanket of snow.

It rarely snows on Christmas in Wall, only once in my memory, and of that memory, I only remember that it snowed on that Christmas, not what gifts I received or whether I liked them.

I suppose I’ll go sledding tomorrow, down the big hill right around the corner, then come home and have hot chocolate. And there’ll be no school for us collegians, reciting the script of a youthful snow-day as if we never grew up, rejoicing that school is cancelled, school is cancelled! – even if we were never going to be there in the first place.

The Sacred Space, Part I

All the shudders of the temple were closed. All the doors were closed. The carpets scrubbed and clean, arranged ornately and geometrically correct. The proper incense was wafting across the huge inner chamber. The gold statues had been polished, the candles lit, the electric lamps dimmed. The host had been been brought out. Mikhail sat alone in the center of it all, bowed, almost kissing the floor, and rhythmically humming the incantations.

He had been trained for years in Senna, and it showed. When he sang, an entire flock of geese outside fell directly into line and moved in tandem, mesmerized. The acoustically built temple echoed the gentle, mellow rhythms of his inner turmoil back to him. The world shrank to just the size of the Palace, then just the size of Mikhail’s body, then just the size of his heart, and then it disappeared and he believed himself floating in another world. He floated in that aetherial bliss for hours, but when at last he closed his mouth and lifted his head, physically exhausted but spiritually whole and cleansed, it had been no more than mere minutes. His limbs were so weak from the concentration that he collapse over sideways, head rebounding on the cold stone floor, just inches from the rich silk carpet.

Minutes later, Alexander, who had been patiently waiting outside for his master and mentor, pushed open the mammoth door and entered the sacred space. Far across the chamber, by the host, he saw the collapsed Mikhail.

“Are you okay, Master?” the young boy asked.

Mikhail groaned. “Yes Sasha, my limbs are just weak from concentration.”

“Please Master, could you call me Alexander? I’m not a boy anymore.”

With Alexander’s help, Mikhail rose to his feet. His balance was precarious though, so Alexander supported him beneath his left arm, and together they hobbled their way out of the sacred chamber.

“You are still only a boy, Sasha, no more than sixteen. And even if you were eighteen, or twenty, or forty, or eighty you would still have the spirit of a boy. You earn your adulthood, Sasha. We all do.”

When they reached the huge doors, which Alexander has left slightly ajar when he entered, they slipped through, and Alexander placed Mikhail safely on a chair in the nearby reading room, where he had prepared a cozy fire, a thick blanket of the finest threads and a tray of small pastries. Alexander shut the door, and the sound of its lock resonated throughout the entirety of the palace.

“Did you see anything, master?” Alexander said. They were both sitting in the reading room, Mikhail besides the fire with the blanket and enjoying the pastries, Alexander a few feet away, sitting on the floor.

“All and nothing, as always,” he said blankly. Alexander sometimes deeply respected his tendency for cryptic statements, but other times, like now, it irritated him to no end.

“That’s not true,” Alexander said. “You must’ve seen something.” This was a dance they danced, every so often.

“It is my job to see nothing,” Mikhail said. Although he was quite enjoying the cream-filled pastries, which Sasha had prepared himself, he put down the one he was eating, and gazed into the deep red-heart of the fire. “And if I ever do see anything, it’s my job to say nothing of it.”

Alexander wanted to hit him. His left arm twitched, ever so slightly. “The Czar says they’ve already passed the border. They’re no more than ten days journey from us.”

“This is a spiritual matter, not a military matter, as it always has been and always will be,” Mikhail said. He felt bad to be so cold to the boy, but he could not get his mind straight recently, and the sessions were only complicating his emotions. It took everything he had to keep the proper demeanor of a chanter, and he had no reserve energy to be kind to his pupil, or to teach his pupil, and or to respect his pupil. But he knew that, and it made his incantations all the stronger when he was in the sacred chamber, that additional item weighing on his heart. He knew, in a way, that it was making Sasha stronger, too.

Alexander, dejected, played with the fibers of the rug. He hadn’t received a lesson in weeks, even a practice session, barely any advice. He had been doing little more than making pastries and starting fires.

He turned and gazed out the window, at the layer of snow covering the ground, and at the light, downy flakes that had begun to fall since last time he looked out a window. The horizon stretched on, endless and unforgiving.

Darker Than Black: Effective Storytelling and Anime

The main characters. The guy front and center is Hei, a contractor with the power to control electricity. Behind him is Lin, the mysterious girl with the power to track others through water. In the back are Mao, a talking cat, and to the left is Huang, their boss.

My friend Eric introduced me recently to Darker Than Black, a shonen anime revolving around superpowered killing machines beings called contractors who operate in and around Tokyo in a dystopian future. Like most enjoyable shonen I’ve seen, it skews heavily towards character development and action, often both at the same time.

Darker Than Black likes to throw you in the middle of the story, give you very little context, and let you fill in the gaps as the plot progresses. We’ve watched through the first twelve or so episodes, and the basic premise of the world and why it is the way it is has not been addressed in any revealing way. On the episode level too, characters, plot threads, symbols and scenes are introduced with as little context as possible. It’s very mysterious, often confusing, and honestly . . . really compelling. I can’t say I’ve watched or read to much in my life that went about telling a story in the same way, leaving the viewer in the dark as much as possible.

Denial of information can, in fact, be an effective tool for storytelling. It’s the classic reverse-psychological trick of saying you have a story to tell, but then insist that it’s not worth telling: people become naturally curious, and that curiosity can serve as the fuel that lights the engine of a compelling story.

MINOR SPOILERS. For example: The second episode revolves around a girl who slowly is becoming a contracter and her relationship with her father. It took me until deep into the second episode of this two-episode arc to understand just how complicated the episode was, and just as I came to that realization, the plot resolved itself in a fiery dynamo of emotion and action.

Lingering in the background of its distinct storytelling style are, of course, the conventions of shonen anime, too. The climax of every single arc (the series, at least on the DVD bundle Eric has, is cut up into a collection of short two-episode story arcs that are, for the most part, stand-alone) involves combat, and the aftermath of that combat always brings insight into the inner emotional workings of the combatants. In the aforementioned episode, the girl’s relationship with her father is fleshed out. As the episodes continue, we get bits and pieces of Hei’s relationship with his now-deceased sister. And of course, the basic premise of the story allows for each character to have unique super-powers that define them.

I’m pretty jealous of these conventions. They’re incredibly flexible and naturally invite conflict, resolution, and growth. And I can’t use them if I want to write a short story without seeming like a bizarre anime child.

Or maybe I can . . . ?

Write On: Epilogue

Well, what have we learned? I set out originally to understand writing a bit better. Although it defies direct description at times, I feel like I’ve gotten at part of the core of it, in a way. Listen:

Tomorrow, I will berate myself over how sloppy my flash fiction is.

Next month, I’ll probably cry because my poems are bad.

Next year, I may flip out over a book that changes my life.

My feelings towards writing aren’t going to go away. In the worst of times she’ll appear to me as my guardian angel, in the best of times, as my personal demon. But if nothing else, amidst the chaos of life, writing will allow me to grab a moment of peace, a brief reflection, a tiny shard of bliss.

What more could I want in a best friend?

Write On, Part VI: Just Be

On my fourth day of freshman orientation, feeling lonely, depraved and anxious, I began keeping a journal. I chronicled my experience as a college freshman, dazzled and confused with this new place. When Hurricane Sandy hit, and campus lost power for a week, my whole world entered a dream-like stasis.

Classes stopped. Suddenly without any homework, the specter of writing hung around me, asking I take this time to produce more work, to bleed onto a page, to do anything to continue feeling I had a reason to go on. And then – amidst the sulking – the following happened, as recounted in my journal. My friends and I sneaked onto the uncompleted Quad during the height of the storm. For maximum effect, play the song as you read this excerpt:

Finally, we made it to the center of the quad . . . for the first time I noticed not just how savage Sandy was, but how beautiful she was. There was something intensely harmonic about the movement, about the destruction. . . . Sandy was like a raging symphony – like Beethoven’s fifth, undeniably energetic yet thoroughly planned, capturing so elegantly the spark of spontaneity to make it all look effortless – of course this note would come next, of course the wind would blow this direction now.

When I landed (metaphorically) from my experience, I looked over and saw Nikki jumping up and down, pointing at a wind-snake of leaves. I reverted to cringing: “Nikki, it’s dangerous!”

                         To which she replied:

                        “Luke, it’s poetry!”

 

Writing need not be agony. It need not be pain. It doesn’t have to exist on a page or in your mind, it does not need to be forced, it does not need to be slaved over, it does not need to be anything more than a split second.

Writing is just being.