August 14th, 2009 by Neal

“The damage doesn’t look as bad from up here!” -C3PO

I have one line in my outline: “Hal goes home, tries to get to sleep before his first day, and is kept awake by the five-shot salute.”

Hal is in Tacoma in the second book. I suppose that’s a bit spoilery, but there’s an arc to it. He starts the first book in Salt Lake City, for the second book he’s in Tacoma, in the third and fourth I know where he’ll be, but I want to mention Tacoma because it’s part of the war of writing this novel.

Blue Collar Slut sees Hal in a very happy place. He’s doing some things that aren’t very pleasant, and he’s confronted by some truly awful human beings, but he knows his place in the world.

In the second he doesn’t. Half of that is because of plot factors, but the other fact is simply being in Tacoma. It unhinges him. He doesn’t know how to react to the different culture, the different life. It’s definitely been a through the looking glass experience so far, because I know Tacoma, and I know how Hal handles life, and we’re just different in many respect. Tacoma is unhinging him. That lone sentence above turned into an entire chapter where he flails around rather helplessly and tries to figure out the place I used to live in.

Tacoma is a ghetto, and Tacoma is not a ghetto. By the wikipedia standard (COUGH) any area that has marginalized, largely poor minority populations is a GHETTO. But of course, ghetto isn’t a fucking status, it’s a state of mind, so when it comes down to it, it’s not Johannesburg, but it’s also not, say, even Seattle.

When I lived there, I heard gunshots at night. I feared for my life. There were drug deals I could see through my window. There was black on white adversity. There was gentrification. There was very low living standards, and I went to a school that was probably fifty percent white, 25 percent black, ten percent asian/pacific islanders, and five percent mutant sloths.

The population is working class, semi-military, and there’s a lot of alcohol.

Now, here’s the issue. I don’t have any statistics to back that up. I can’t say to you, “LOOK AT THIS HORRIBLE GRAPH!” And I know, in my heart, there are fifty worse cities all across America with residents who would pray to live in a place like Tacoma (including, ironically enough, the Salt Lake City area, which I hear has gangs up the yazoo).

But it’s a symbolic journey. Hal’s going from completely aimless, to hope, where he sees potential but doesn’t know how to go about it, to tragedy, and then back to where he started, but with a guiding light. That’s purposefully, maddeningly vague, but it’s my journal, so bite a dick.

I am living in a place now where my neighbors smile at me. Where there’s trees, and no smell. There’s no gang activity. Shit, even the taggers are pussies around here. You see a bike go by every thirty seconds, and I have yet to see anything even remotely scary or dangerous beyond assholes who cut right in front of bikes on right turns.

THE HORROR!

But at any rate, the reason I write all of this is because I know, in my heart, I’ll probably catch flak from people for my portrayal of Tacoma. People who live on the north side, hell, even the south side, might not see the level of craziness I experienced on hilltop. I grew up on the south end and I didn’t hear gunshots at night. It was a family area with a lot of working class problems, but relatively tame (if active) gang and drug activity. And by the time this is published, shit, it might have changed into the relatively safe area it was when I moved there, after gentrification had led to a pretty tame area in many respects while the housing boom was in force.

I just want to know what I was thinking moving there, I guess. What I hoped to recapture. With Hal, he’s there out of a desperate set of circumstances, and the question is not if he’ll stay, because in his heart he knows he won’t, it’s just more that he wants to know why the city ticks the way it does, and what he can do to fix it. And unlike his little fiefdom in the trailer park, he’s gonna find he can’t change shit in Tacoma, and perhaps the only solution is to abandon ship.

This is not to malign the good people of the city who fight to survive. It’s just chaos theory, dig?

February 20th, 2009 by admin

This is one block from where I lived, where they’re pulling the body of a woman out of the ground. I was there when she went missing.

I used to take Hunter up that hill on my morning walks. He loved it, and went nuts sniffing. Now I wonder if this is why.

Anyone else glad I fucking moved? I am.

In other news, the bus honked for the tenant’s child today, but no child came out. I believe they are finally, blessedly gone.