Dave Press

There is a house in the middle of a field settled in front of rolling hills placed just outside of a town that doesn’t matter.           

The house has a patio that extends around the first floor with pillars, not unlike the ones you’d find on the White House, that rise up to the second floor framing fifteen windows.  You can see the house from the main road. A road that only welcomes five drivers a day, but for six or seven miles there is nothing but patted down field.  A shed to the left side of this house has two parked cars in front of it: a metallic blue BMW X5, and a red ‘67 Mustang with black convertible top. We come in through the left hand side of the house, to a strawberry-blond haired woman, lying on her stomach, blood coming out the back of her head.           

This grisly scene spills out into a mess in the doorframe, leading to the kitchen where remnants of a salad were left out.  Stairs go up after the left side entrance. Climbing the stairs, immediately after the main floor, are two doors one on the right and left side.  The left side room is too small for a full bath, but managed to squeeze in a toilet and a sink. The room across from it is a closet. The balcony off the stairs has a landing with two uncomfortable wood chairs matching a coffee table littered with magazines.            

The couple called this the Sun Room, because of the windows around all sides.  They had been thinking about knocking out the windows and making this a second patio, but they hadn’t been living here long enough to really do anything about it.           

Off the Sun Room, there is another smaller hallway with a door at the end.  This door opens up to a huge bedroom with white carpet, a bronze bed frame with sheets that match the carpet.  The room is void of pictures except a lone picture on an end table, naturally, of the aforementioned couple.           

The bathroom door is parallel to the back of the bed and when we enter the walls are red with pictures of pine trees framed in birch wood.           

A graying curly-haired man sits on the seat of the enclosed shower, his head in his hands.  A gold chain hangs from his neck.  Swinging around now—catching the man’s eyes—shower-stream pushes his hair straight down his eyes. There are traces of wrinkles under his eyelids but not because he’s old, but because he feels he has nothing more to care about.           

His name is Marten, and is completely, a loss for words.            

We hold on his face until he wipes the water and hair back.

Concentrate.  What just happened? He looks up at the showerhead, begging it for an answer, the water only pushing his hair back behind his forehead.

My brain fires on all cylinders early weekend mornings these days, like all the information and motivation collected during the week needs to be eggressed (is that the right word?) early in the morning.  The right word may just be more like ejected.  All the information gathered from the work week to the rest of the shit brought during the week that I don’t get much of a chance to process, it all comes bubbling over early Saturday and Sunday morning.  So here’s what I’ve been thinking/working on this weekend:

THESIS: I started my Lit Research Class last week where the guy preached that we must find scholarly editions of the authors we wish to write about. Like University Press editions. He had us all talk about what we wanted to write about and he thought my topic was “interesting and modern,” but felt that he doesn’t think I can find sources like he mentioned. Well, there’s Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics, and a lot of the great writing by Tim Callahan, but other than that, and a lot of the great stuff being written on the Internet, I may be running myself into a dead end because of the quote-unquote “lack of scholarly criticism” defined by people who have yet to embrace the medium. The problem is because of the lack of standard literary criticism of comic books the guy may just pan this thesis all together, and frankly, I feel like the stuffy and mostly pompous “literary community” could use something like this paper.

LETTER: Like I posted yesterday, I’m writing a letter to someone I haven’t spoken to since graduating from high school more than ten years ago. (OLD). I’m thinking he’d like to read a letter that kind of takes him away from where he currently is for a little bit, and I’m sending him a few comics.

SHORT: I’m writing a story about a group of kids checking out an abandoned building in a small town. Thinking the building is haunted and doing the general thing that 12 and 13 year old kids do, where it’s still okay to do childish things like break into abandoned buildings. Well, not break into, just crawl through a hole in the structure. Regardless, the story is about being trying to be alternative, how a lot of us kids after Kurt Cobain died were trying so hard to be alternative by listening to the right music (Green Day, before Dookie and Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy) but all we were doing was trying to be a part of a crowd and that’s not really being alternative.  So the story is about a group of those kids, in 1993, how you’re not really being alternative when you’re doing the same thing that a crowd of kids are doing in the name of being alternative to their parents or the town or whatever, but how that awkward period—that summer between eighth grade and freshman year—is really about still having some innocent kid fun. Before it’s no longer okay to do that sort of thing, and everyone either splits up into the jock or theater nerd categories.

I’m starting to edit the book I recently finished writing. Boy is it awful writing. I just said, “boy,” in case you missed that.  Jesus. But I’m sure that alot of people aren’t entirely shocked by the fact that it’s probably awful writing. It’s a first book, so the chances of it being totally awesome writing are pretty slim. We’ll see, it’s a real fun story that has pretty much been a part of my life, in some form or another, all of my five years here in NYC. It’s had a lot of forms from novella, to comic book, and now it’s finally a novel. I’m just glad that it’s done, I just want to make sure it’s readable in some off chance that someone wants to read it sometime when I’m 70.

The screenplay, titled “Trucker” went through some changes to streamline things. We’re going to be setting up a Tumblr at some point where Tim and I talk about the script and chronicle the journey of the entire project. Credit must go where where credit is due, I got the idea from what Rian Johnson did with The Brothers Bloom Tumblr, and I figured it’s a great idea to set up something like that for our little project. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought of this.