“That classroom can be your battleground or your playground,” Frank McCourt said is his memoir Teacher Man. That sentence has stuck since I first read it, embedded deep into my mind (and, in fact, I have the words hanging on my classroom wall), the thought reemerging almost daily when I feel my blood pressure begin to rise, when my hands begin to sweat with frustration over whatever it is that the students are resisting or complaining about on that given day. Make this our playground, I remind myself. Don’t fight them.

“Why don’t you want to read this?” I remember asking the students against my better judgment. What are you doing? I then asked myself, immediately regretting that I had taken the bait that was the collective groan of the class. You’re the teacher. Don’t ask them. Don’t enable this defiance. Just do it.

“I’m sick of reading,” one student finally chimed in.

“How could you possibly be sick of it? You don’t even know what we are reading yet,” I responded - and they didn’t know. This was the Roaring Twenties that I was teaching the class. Gangsters! Gambling! Moonshining! Violence, guns, prostitution, and lawbreaking! It was everything that would quench their thirst for chaos. If I couldn’t get these fifteen year old kids interested in this, then what hope could there possibly be for me?

“The only reason we even bother to read any of this is because there’s going to be a stupid test on it,” the same student added without a hint of condescension. “It’s all we ever do in school. Every single block. Read. Test. Read. Test. Read. Test.”

I considered what he was saying and stood quietly in front of the class of twenty-nine freshmen, unsure of what to say. All eyes were on me, waiting to see my reaction. Yet, I had engaged this conversation and another preaching session on the value of reading wasn’t going to cut it… and I couldn’t simply end it. I had to find a way to put a positive spin on it. In my mind, I pulled up a task list of options, looking desperately for a solution that wasn’t in any of the educational theory books that I had read in college. Where do I take this conversation from here?

“Well, I’m still pretty new at this teaching thing, you know,” I said. “So fill me in here. What don’t you like about reading?”

“Tests, man,” the student told me and his classmates nodded along, as if I were now in on some ancient secret that they all knew.

“Tests.”

“Tests. It’s not the reading for most of us. At least I don’t think. I’m just so sick of filling out stupid tests. First block, second block, PSSAs. Can’t we just read something for once and enjoy it without having to fill out all those stupid questions afterwards?”

I again considered this. “Point taken,” I replied. “But in the meantime, let’s get reading.”

The class groaned again and we began to read.

I learned a lot during that brief conversation. I hadn’t quite been sure how the handle it at the time, but I did realize one important lesson: I need to let the students talk. I need to let the students explain to me their frustrations and why they are groaning instead of simply telling them to knock it off. I learned that if the classroom is a battleground, the tests are the landmines that the students want so desperately to avoid. They want the classroom to be a playground just as I do.

I remember going home that night and laying on my couch and thinking the conversation over. Tests, man. Who could blame them? 

The next reading assignment that we read as a class was an excerpt from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. When we finished reading it, I told them that I didn’t have anything to go with it, but I wanted to know what they had thought. There was silence for a moment. Then the student who had spoken up in protest of testing chimed in.

“It was pretty good, I guess,” he said. 

That was the only response volunteered by the students, but as the class ended, I still felt pretty good about the whole situation. It may not have solved anything. Most would probably never remember the story. And I just may not have had the most effective solution to the problem right then and there. I realized in that moment though that if I just learned to listen sometimes, the students had some pretty good ideas.

It’s been a long, sleep deprived, ugly, emotionally exhausting few days - as is always the case when death happens. It will be good to get back into the grind of work tomorrow.

In other news, I still haven’t found those floppy disks. My brother mentioned that he may or may not have thrown them away at one point. The search will continue over the next few weeks when I can find the time, but those awful stories and essays from my teenage years may be lost forever.

I did find the two very first “novels” that I ever wrote though. I’ve talked about them before on here, but the first is LAPD, which I have dated with a hand-written copyright date of 1995 (when I was nine years old). It’s 78 pages of impossibly absurd situations (I think my character, the “number two cop in the world,” is shot 12 or 13 times throughout the story) and nonsensical dialogue, inspired by watching too much Die Hard at too young of an age. I still remember sitting at my old desk by my childhood window, our dog Co-Co howling away out back, my hand cramping as the words came to my brain faster than my little hand could write, thinking that I was writing the next major Hollywood adaptation. As you can see, I already picked out who I wanted as the stars.

The second is my fifth grade magnum opus Alien Havoc, a loose sequel to the Alien movies. I was the protagonist and most of the other characters were my fifth grade friends (and a few enemies). I passed it around school and it was much talked about and my teacher took it home over a weekend and complimented me on it when she brought it back on Monday. I have a hunch she never read it or I would have been down in the principal’s office (or guidance counselor’s) for some of the disturbing Alien-inspired violence. It’s 60-some typed pages single spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman font. If only I had the focus now that I had when I was eleven.

The above link leads to my other blog where I discuss some of my thoughts on life as a teacher.

I spent an unreasonable amount of time on the sixth floor of my old undergraduate campus library - escaping to the same small one-person desk by the window, doing work or reading, sometimes getting distracted by all of the books surrounding me, sometimes getting distracted by the cute girl in glasses at the desk facing me a few rows away, and, more often than I care to admit, sometimes taking an hour here and there to put in my down in an attempt to sleep off a hangover.

It’s been three years now since I’ve spent a significant amount of time on the campus and it’s strange coming back, if even for just a few moments, taking note of all the changes and improvements (where were those suites when I was a student?), driving by buildings I spent so much time in, seeing how young so many of the students look, chuckling as I pass houses and apartment buildings that I associate with blurred memories - some good, some bad, some so ridiculous that I sometimes have to question the validity of my memory. 

I don’t miss college. I don’t miss the stupidity, the irresponsibility, or the erratic schedule. I don’t miss sleeping until noon on Saturdays. I don’t miss the ease of the classes, the difficult first lessons in financial responsibility, the absurdity of a near nightly bar scene where pitchers of the light beer on special were all we could afford, or the seemingly endless stream of young women who, like me, were experiencing and enjoying freedom for the first time. I don’t miss these constant discoveries as I transitioned from teenager to adult. I might slightly miss bullshitting with professors and the uniqueness of a lifestyle crafted by meeting new people every week, people from all over the world who were just as wide-eyed and naive about their own freedom as I was, but I don’t miss much else.

Damn though, it was still fun.

When I was a child, all I wanted to be was a cop. I could probably blame my parents for letting me watch Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Turner & Hooch as early as kindergarten, but I’ll blame it on my overactive imagination. Still, that is what I thought policing was all about: running around making snarky remarks, shooting and getting shot often, and generally kicking ass with very few consequences. In the third grade, I even wrote a sprawling cop tale titled LAPD that filled up 78 pages of a spiral notebook and followed the adventures of my adult detective self - the “#2 cop in the world” as I put it so modestly in my story - pursuing a ruthless serial killer named Jason Travers, who, among other things, brutally murdered my character’s longtime girlfriend Kasey Crawford (her name derived from the then hottest model in the world Cindy Crawford whose poster even then I had on my wall - always the lover of women, I was). The story was chock full of inconsequential violence, adult language, and gratuitous nudity - yet, when I showed off my twisted story to my teacher, she only praised me for my motivation, and when I showed my peers, they showered me with enthusiastic praise as well as their own confusion with what they had just read (and why there hadn’t been more Ninja Turtles in it).

It was around the fifth grade that I came to adore the Alien movies and decided that perhaps my future lay in the life of not just a cop, but a space cop. Besides, if Back to the Future II and Blade Runner were any indication, by 2015-19, we would certainly be in space, and if we were in space, then is was unquestionable that space cops would be needed - a priority even.

So then came my fifth grade novel Alien Havoc - my very first typed affair that followed the space cop that was my future self who stumbled across an alien ship chock full of aliens completely ripped off from the world of Ellen Ripley (with a touch of influence from the 1995 arguable soft-core porno Species, which I somehow convinced my mother to let me rent on VHS after riding my bicycle 8 miles to the nearest movie store and having the clerk call home asking for permission - “Yeah, mom, it’s sort of like Aliens only newer”). My new novel, I felt at the time, was my magnum opus, a brilliantly crafted examination of not only my character, but also the thoughts of the queen alien as well, bouncing back and forth in a third person narrative between our two characters.

It was fucking terrible.

But hell, what eleven year old didn’t imagine a life of glory, of traveling in space and fighting aliens, of getting the girl after a few potentially mortal wounds. Naturally, this desire would stick with me, even as I shed the silliness of my childhood and replaced it with the silliness of my teenage years. I expected, as a graduating senior in high school, to still go into the field.

But I had no idea. I wondered, at age eighteen, if being a cop was reasonable. I had no idea. I applied everywhere for every program that I could imagine exciting. I applied and was accepted to Embry-Riddle for the Aeronautical Science program to be a pilot, California State Long Beach for Film and Video Production to become a filmmaker, Cornell for English to become the writer, UPenn for political science to become to youngest president, John Jay in NYC for criminal justice to become a cop - in other words, I was 18 years old and had no goddamn clue what I wanted to do, except that I wanted to do everything. I had big plans even if I hadn’t yet made them. Eventually, I left my small town in Pennsylvania, my country boy upbringing, to pursue a dual major in criminology and sociology at Florida Southern College, a small college situated between Orlando and Tampa Bay that forced me to go to a Sunday church service twice a semester (I skipped once and they knew… goddammit, they knew). With this degree, my hopes of a crime fighting related future were still intact and I had visions of working for the DEA, maybe, just maybe even the CIA if I could con my way into it - that is before after a few semesters I transferred back to a crummy ol’ state college back home in PA leaving behind my life of year-round tans and bleached blondes in hopes of securing the high school sweetheart and in turn completely altering my major to the education field, which she was also in at her own school. We’d be two peas in a pod, two teachers, sharing vacations, sharing stories - how sweet, I had thought at the time.

It was a strange, strange turn of events for a young man who had once said as a teenager: “I will never ever be a teacher. Too predictable of a life.” Ask the eleven year old me if I would be in my mid-twenties and back in the area that I grew up back in a rural school, and that eleven year old me would only laugh. “No,” he would say, “If I’m not in space at that point then it’s only because I’m dead.” Well, I’m alive. And I’m not in space. Yet.

If you click right here, you can read the first 22 pages of an unedited rough copy of one of my novels. At this moment, I have written about 100 pages, but releasing 22 of these pages seemed like a good idea - a Black Friday special, if you will.

I have no title and I have not yet written an abstract, but the novel is my twisted take on human nature and religious mythology. As such, it is peppered with elements of fantasy in its dealings with the idea of god, fallen angels, and so forth. The fantasy writing is very much out of my comfort zone and this is much less personal than most of my writing, but that is also part of the reason why I wanted to write on the subject matter. My goal in this was to write a story that would be a little more accessible than the bizarre nonsense I usually write as well as follow the traditional regular guy gets mixed up in a grandiose plot story arc (with a few twists, of course). It’s more in the style of Stephen King than Cormac McCarthy. More Gaiman than Faulkner. But I am moderately happy with the results so far.

Feel free to reblog, but also feel free to send me your feedback, compliments, criticism, and death threats. All are welcome!

Despite our youthful insistence on embracing cynicism, inward lies a stubborn optimism. It refuses to be denied. It will work out. We will do that. We will be somebody. Hope turns to apathy turns to despair. Bitterness. Humored acceptance of circumstances. It’s a smooth transition - a gradual fizzle, not a smother. We will be anybody. There is no coming of age. There is no mark burned into a timeline, highlighting the moment when we veer towards our adult complacency, begging for someone to bring us back to where we were, sneering at those who have managed to hold on. We will be nobody.

I’m feeling it again - the longing, the desire, the need, the itch. It’s been awhile, too much distraction from reality, death, love, sex, but there is something about the lone late night that brings it out. Something in the smell of the darkness, the chirping of the crickets, the stillness in the air. It’s a need to go, go, go, anywhere, somewhere, nowhere, to not accept the reality, the mediocrity, the simplicity, to say fuck it and mean it, but no, you’re too old for that now, I remind myself, you could have gotten away with it then, but now there’s too many responsibilities, too many bills, too many people to hurt, you can’t, can’t, can’t, so here I am, sitting, never been so tired, never been so awake, hands on my keyboard, smelling the darkness, hearing the crickets chirping, and feeling the stillness in the air.

It won’t finish itself. We all do it – move on with our lives, expecting whatever it was that we expected to finish to finish itself, despite that we aren’t actually doing anything to finish it ourselves, despite that we’re expecting it handed to us on a ruby-crested platinum platter with grapes that turn into wine right in our very mouths. Meanwhile, we realize that this was all a daydream on the way to our reality, whatever it may be, with whatever it may be involving eight hours of being unremarkable and unknown and on our way to obscurity and death.

There’s a fear of wasting whatever gifts we have, whatever potential for leading a remarkable life there is – could have been goddamn President of the United States, Miss Foulk even said so in second grade – yet the fear isn’t enough to get us off of our asses and do anything about it besides internally bitch and we find every excuse in the book to make up for it, to not complete any one of those two hundred and eighty two files on the flash drive. I don’t have the time. I’m too tired. Exhausted. Always. I’ll do it over break. I’ll do it this summer. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.

We build the walls that we refuse to climb.

Wednesday whiskey. Aged eight goddamn years. I pretend I can tell the difference, but it all warms as it goes down. I end up in the same place.

In looking at the properties of my “writing” folder, there are 232 separate files. That’s 232 separate pieces of writing and ideas - some coherent, some nonsensical, some old, some written in drunken rants after a night at the bar during my junior year of college, or some forty-seven pages of a novel that I never finished. I can’t even begin to fathom what those 232 pieces of writing contain, brief glimpses into moments of my life - the drinking, the fucking, the fighting, the absurdity, the arrogance, the self-pity, the anger, the hope, the despair, the lust, the wondering, the completely unbelievable that is there to remind me that my memories of it all aren’t distorted, that it all actually happened. And I somehow survived it all.

If I die, somebody come get my flash drive and publish “The Unfinished Works of Jonathan James.”

“Unfinished” because I never fucking finish any of it.

In a world that is becoming more connected than ever, I am fascinated with the possibilities of collaborative creative projects (see: JGL’s HitRecord). For that reason, I am putting into motion an idea that I have had for a while now - and while it may fail miserably, it is an experiment that I have no choice but to attempt or I risk going insane thinking about over and over again.

It is THE BOOK OF TUMBLR.

The idea is that it will be a continuously evolving story crafted entirely by the Tumblr community. The purpose of this experiment is to see where our collective minds can take a story - and to see if it is even possible for numerous people with different ideas and writing styles to come up with a story worth reading.

I have written the first chapter, which is purposely outrageous, over-the-top, and vague. In theory, each chapter henceforth will be written by a new Tumblr user. Where the story will go, how the characters will evolve, and so forth will remain a mystery to the each writer as they complete their chapter.

As of now, I do not have anyone lined up to write the second chapter. I do not wish to ask anyone. I want those who feel inspired to do so to step forward. If you want to contribute (and I can think of so many people who may be reading this who I would love to contribute), go here to read further.

And right here is the Table of Contents, where each chapter will be listed in order and with each author’s name and blog link.

I hope to hear from you - and if you’re not comfortable writing, I do hope that you read and maybe even assist in spreading the word.

I slip into the foggy existence like I have so many times before. The drink is fulfilling - for the night at least. I feel a vibration and reach in my pocket. I hold the phone in my hand, steady, trying to focus. I see her name and although I haven’t spoken to her in months, I seem to have been waiting for her to call this night. I answer.

“I am where we went to prom together,” she says with no introduction.

“Is that so?” I say.

“I miss you sometimes.”

“I miss you sometimes too.”

“Are you drunk?” she asks.

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes.” A pause. “You didn’t need that when we were together.”

“I don’t need it now. And you didn’t need it either.” Another pause. “That’s irrelevant anyway. Those people we were are nothing more than a distant memory. A dream.”

“A great dream though. It was another life, huh? A life I’m through with but wish I could continue sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t tell me this,” I say.

“We were in love, weren’t we?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Maybe being in love is just a convenient way of pretending we know what life is all about, when really, we haven’t a clue.”

“I don’t pretend to know,” I say. “I know I loved you and I thought that was the answer to everything. I know now that isn’t true -” Pause. “Although it may be a part of it.”

“Do you still love me?”

I consider this. 

“I want back what we had sometimes,” I say, “but even if I could have you back, I wouldn’t.”

“I know.”

“You know.”

“I know.”

Silence.

“You’ve always been so stubborn,” she says.

“One of many mistakes.”

“You didn’t make any mistakes.”

“All right.”

“I wish you didn’t hate me. Every day. But I hope someday that’ll change.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. I try to get that. As much as I can.”

“Good.”

“I should go.”

“Okay.”

“I miss you.”

“Okay.”

I hang up the phone and make another drink.