This was originally written in 2003, after I'd published Dancing Barefoot, and was still working on Just A Geek. At the time, I wasn't sure if I was a writer, an actor, or some combination of the two, though I was trying very hard to convince myself (and the Voice of Self Doubt) that I was just going to be a writer. 

I enjoyed writing narrative nonfiction, and the feedback I got from my narrative nonfiction work was overwhelmingly positive, but it was (and is) very important to me to be a fiction writer. I had some ideas for short stories, but I just couldn't overcome my self-consciousness long enough to turn the ideas into anything more. It was frustrating to me, so I went to Old Town, determined to get some kind of narrative story out of the experience.

I still haven't written the short stories I was trying to create back then, but I think that what I did write that day has a clear narrative voice and holds up rather well.

"Can I get food at the bar?" I ask.

"Of course!"

"Thanks," I say, and take a seat.

The waitress working the bar appears to be about the same age as me, in stark contrast to the other girls who look like they're all in their early 20s. There are heavy bags beneath her tired and sad eyes.

"What can I get you?" she asks.

"A Guinness and a cheeseburger," I say.

She turns, and pours me a pint. It's still settling when she puts it in front of me.

"Not many people drink Guinness in the middle of the day," she says.

"Is that a fact?" I say. In my mind I'm Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, and I'm in a 1920s Hollywood speakeasy.

"It is," she says, "I think this is the only pint I've poured all day.

"Well, I don't like to drink beer I can see through," I say, as I lift the now-settled glass to my lips.

Her laugh doesn't make it to her eyes, but it's still friendly. I find a kindred spirit in her sadness. We're both in a place we didn't expect to be. I bet I'm the first guy she's waited on all day who hasn't stared at her skimpy outfit while talking to her.

"Hey, honey, can we get another pitcher of Bud over here?" calls a guy in a George Zimmer signature suit at the corner of the bar. His tie is loose and he bounces his leg on the rail. It shakes under my foot. I don't like that at all.

I look around the restaurant. I've never seen it this full during the day. John Fogerty tells me that there's a bad moon on the rise.

"Sure," she says, and walks down to the taps.

Two young girls turn heads as they walk in and sit at a table behind me. "Oh my god! Your eyebrows look so great!" the tall one says.

"Don't they? I totally had them tattoo'd on," she says.

I tune them out and count the rings down my glass: one . . . two . . . three.

Four.

I look down the bar and see Men's Wearhouse and his business partners putting their best midlife crisis moves on the waitress — my waitress. Brown Suit stares at her chest while Blue Suit flashes a capped smile at her. She giggles and fusses with her hair, and fills their glasses.

"Hurry back!" Brown Suit says, as she walks back up the bar.

Five. I stare at the top of my beer. It looks like clouds over a black sky.

"So what do you do?" she asks.

" . . . I guess I'm a writer."

"You guess you are, or you are?"

"I am. I'm blocked today."

"By what?"

"The Bogeyman."

"What's that?"

"A convenient literary metaphor."

"You are a writer."

I laugh. "Yeah, I guess I am."

"Have you written anything I've read?" she asks. A loaded question.

"Probably not," I say, "I wrote one, and the people who read it seem to like it, and I'm working on another one."

"But you're blocked today," she says.

"Yeah. This place is sort of involved in my career choice, so I thought I'd come here and try to break the block."

"How's that working out for you?" she asks. A flicker of mirth passes her eyes.

"Well, at the very least, I'll get a Guinness out of the deal."

While looking for something entirely-unrelated, I came across this old post from 2006. I read the entire post that it's excerpted from on , but this part made me smile, so it gets its own spot right here on my bloggy-blog-blog:

Though I've been there for several auditions, I haven't been on the Universal Studio Tour since  A-Team and Knight Rider were in prime time.

I can mark that particular period of time with this degree of certainty, because I clearly recall talking with KITT, and wanting to ask it if it ever raced the A-Team van around the back lot, but actually asking something stupid about how fast it could go.

I also recall taking a scratch off game with me on the tour tram, where we were supposed to look for A-Team characters in various places, and scratch off the appropriate image on the map, with the promise of a prize for kids who turned in correctly completed games. I can't remember all of them, but Mr. T — well, a model of Mr. T's head, anyway — was in this out of control train that was supposed to come within inches of crashing into the tram, and I was so busy trying to figure out how they did it, I forgot to scratch him off . . . until the tour guide reminded all us kids to scratch off that circle on our map.

"That's stupid," I told my mom, "if they're just going to tell everyone where the A-Team is, why should we even look?"

"Maybe you can just enjoy the tour," she said.

2006 was a fantastic year for me as a writer. When I go through the 2005-2006 archives, I see a lot of creative writing and narrative non-fiction that I recall having a lot of fun writing, which remains a lot of fun for me to read today. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with how much I was allowing myself to simply enjoy the tour.

In December of 2001, Anne I were really struggling financially. It had already been a pretty lousy year, as far as work went, and after September 11th, things only got worse. As Christmas got closer, it was clear that we simply couldn't afford to put many things under the tree for our kids, let alone each other. 

One night around the second weekend of December that year, Anne and I had a long talk about the impending holidays. We never wanted the holidays to be about stuff, anyway, so we used the opportunity to introduce the concept of "Little Christmas" to our kids. We told them that, contrary to what television told them, it wasn't about shopping and things, as much as it was about spending time with people you love (and music, and spiced cider, and walking through the neighborhood at night to look at all the pretty lights.) Little Christmas began as a financial necessity, but we discovered that putting the emphasis on the holiday "spirit" rather on the holiday "stuff" made us all happier, and we pretty much removed ourselves from the consumerism that bummed out Charlie Brown so much in 1965. 

Even though things eventually got better, we crossed a Rubicon that year, and we never went back. Instead of submerging ourselves in Christmas Crap, we got a few gifts for each other, but we always did some sort of cool thing together as a family, like a trip to the Grand Canyon, or a night out with my parents to see a play. The idea was that Christmas Crap usually gets old and dusty, but the memories we created doing something together would last for the rest of our lives, and that's a better gift to give or receive than anything we could get at the store.

This post From The Vault features a portion of a post I read on this week's Radio Free Burrito, about our 2006 Christmas trip to Julian, in San Diego County, which included a day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park with my brother, his wife, and my parents:

We stayed at the Wild Animal Park until it got dark. On the way out, Nolan came over to me and he said, "I'm really glad we came here today."

"So am I," I said.

"I wasn't all that excited when you told us what we were doing," he said, "but now I'm really glad we did this. I've had a lot of fun today."

"Yeah, your mom and I were a little bummed out that you weren't into doing this when we told you about it," I said, "but we were pretty sure you'd like it once you got here."

"Well, I just wanted to spend the weekend with my friends," he said, "because I'll be gone all next week and I won't get to see them."

"I get that," I said.

"But it was totally worth it to come down here. Thank you."

"I'm really glad you told me that, Nolan," I said.

He smiled, walked over to Anne, and told her the same thing. Then he told my mom.

Nolan is 15, chronologically and in every other sense, and I feel like I'm dealing with something from another planet more often than I'd like these days, so it really meant a lot to me that he made the effort to let the people who pulled the trip together know that he enjoyed it, instead of finding lots of reasons to be sullen and unhappy because . . . well, that's what teenagers do, if I remember correctly.

After dinner that night, we drove back up to Julian, and the rest of my family drove back to their hotel down in the valley. When we got back to the B&B, we put another fire in the stove and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas together. As much as I've loved that special my entire life, this was the first time I watched it and really felt its message about the meaning of Christmas. 

We're not religious, and we're not into the consumerism of the holidays, so it would be easy to feel like we're not part of the whole Christmas thing, but as we sat there, basked in television's warm glowing warming glow, and drank hot apple cider together, we were surrounded by the joy of the season.

Yesterday, I decided that I'd reach into The Vault a few times this week, and reprint some holiday-related posts. 

While I combed through the WWdN archives, I came across this post, which I haven't thought about pretty much since I wrote it. It has nothing to do with the holidays, but I still like it. I'm reprinting it today so I can remember a time when I didn't feel so self conscious about my writing, could totally lose myself in a moment, and do my very best to fearlessly capture it in words.

We are under partly cloudy skies today here in Pasadena. All day long, the blue sky has been brilliant and beautiful. The few clouds that dot the sky are small and fluffy, blown at incredible speeds by the high altitude winds, and illuminated to a magnificently bright white by the sun.

About 20 minutes ago, the sun began to set, and I watched as it put silver linings behind cloud after cloud as it sank into the west. Shortly after the horizon took it away for another day, the sun did an amazing thing: it illuminated the only cloud in the sky, a monstrous one — several thousand feet cross, at least — which hung over my house. The cloud acted as a giant reflector, bouncing yellow, then orange, then red light down upon my neighborhood.

At first, the yellow light was beautiful, bringing out a brilliance in the lawns and leaves seldom seen in winter. Then, the orange light became a little creepy, casting the same muted color as sunlight filtered through the smoke of a brushfire.

When the light turned red, though, it was positively scary. The red glow that it washed over the Earth was straight out of the fires of Mount Doom.

As the light turned from orange to red, my mom called me, and asked me if it looked like the world was coming to an end over my house, too. I laughed, and told her that it did.

Then a Ring Wraith knocked on my door, and I politely hung up the phone.

Remember when Lord of the Rings ruled the world with a power and inevitability challenged and equalled only by frozen yogurt shops in the 80s? Those were some magical days, Precioussss. We loves them.