Excerpt from Midnight in the Velveteen Sector.

Sunlight flooded through a bay window, bathing the living room in a warm orange glow. The grungy brown carpet was worn thin under his knees, the long shaggy knap betraying the neglect and lack of vacuuming that gave birth to a musty odor that brought with it a deluge of memory. The room was familiar in every way, down to his very core. Without so much as lifting his eyes from the floor, he stretched out his right hand and felt the familiar threadbare fabric. Slowly he got up and eased himself onto the uncomfortable orange sofa that held him in its awkward embrace so many afternoons as a child.

He ran his hands over the wooden arm of the sofa, with its numerous dings and bite marks. Somehow he still remembered the exact taste of that wood, though it had been ages since he was little enough to partake of it. His eyes ran over a room that was more precious to him than any place in the world. Each object was a jab of emotion that was silently overwhelming him, bringing him to the verge of a cathartic but voiceless wail.

He got up and walked a couple steps to the other side of the room, to the varnished oak bookshelves that once held an aquarium with snails and translucent minnows and a black fish with eyes that seemed too big to be possible. He remembered the hum of the filter, the eerie bluish-green glow that the tank gave off in the night when all other lights had gone out. He looked over the pictures of kids in Halloween costumes, or visiting a forgotten landmark on a vacation long ago. He was compelled to brush his fingers over the spines of a nearly complete set of encyclopedias, the gold foil of the writing glimmering against the ageless maroon faux-leather material. The K volume was missing, lost in a school project. He had torn his room apart looking for it, stayed up nights fretting about how he was going to explain its absence when the project was completed.

He turned to his right and saw his most valued memory: his piano. It was just as he remembered it, an island of austerity in a sea of whimsical nostalgia. He longed desperately to play it once more, and he felt as though he were hovering above the floor as he slowly moved toward it and reached out his hands to press the keys.

It was silent.

At first he pressed softly, expecting with every fiber of his being the sweetly dull timbre of mallets and strings that had laid dormant in his memory for who knows how long. But nothing came. He pressed harder yet and harder still, but no sound would come from this magical box. He felt frustration boiling up inside him, the frustration of one who finds himself in someone else’s sadistic house of horrors. He had come so close to being at peace and it was cruelly being denied him.
His fists came down thunderous against the black and white fingers, and all at once the sky outside turned an ominous shade of green. Panic arose like a flash flood from the pit of his stomach, a deep fear of something he couldn’t name or remember but of which he knew he would not be able to escape. He dropped once more to his knees and shrunk into a ball as he waited for it.

Monday again.

Ready to have your mind blown? Check out Chris Jordan's current work.

I was able to sit down and write three days last week for about an hour each time. The result is about 3,400 more words for my ongoing book, "Midnight in the Velveteen Sector." The plot is taking me in a few unexpected directions. I'm kind of getting excited about it, but I'm always cautious about blowing it at any moment. There's a kind of tension about writing a work large enough that you can't see the whole thing. A mistake this early on (I'm only 12% through my goal of 100,000 words) could be catastrophic to the work down the road. On the other hand, books that are too cautious early on get set down and never picked up again. One solution is to take some time and flesh out the entire book in more detail before I dive in on the actual writing of it, but I think that method doesn't suit me too well. I like to be surprised by where the story goes, because then I can be relatively assured that the reader will be surprised too. So I guess I'm stuck with having to plow through from beginning to end, hoping it will all work out for the best. When I get the chance I'll post a little tasty blurb f'yallz.

That's it from here, enjoy your Monday and remember: If you touch your brain when you have Alzheimer's you could still, like, die.

PS: My regular readers from Stacy, MN and Prior Lake, MN, identify yourselves! I have a suspicion that we know each other. Shoot me an email if this is the case. Propa!

On writing.

I got myself a Jack Kerouac anthology from the library yesterday. I'm trying to be more writerly. I'm trying to watch a lot of PBS and read the classics in the hope that it'll help me be a better author. You've probably skimmed over the first three sections of a book I'm trying to write, and passed them off as amateurish and boring. Sweet. Well no more sections for you until I'm done. This is not a serial. That being said, I am in the process of writing.

The biggest thing holding me back at this point is simply motivation. I don't want to write more because I'm afraid it will screw up what came before. I can't take failure, and a perfect idea seems more appealing than a mediocre result. Wah wah wah.

I wrote the fourth section last night. The whole project is running about 12 pages right now. In my estimation that's about 5% done. At this rate, it'll probably be around 2030 when I finish. Or I could just suck it up and get on with it, in which case maybe I'll have a draft by the end of the year.

It feels good to finally live out my dream of writing a novel.

Midnight in the Velveteen Sector, Chapter 3.

To many in this day and age, convenience has become an unconscious yet very real pursuit. The history of humanity could be laid out as nothing more than an attempt to make life easier. Wars, inventions, social advances, these things could all be argued from a point of view interested solely in laziness and self-gratification. This would be an odd stance to take, but one which may seduce one’s opponent to rethink the fervor of his argument. It would also be an utterly foolish stance to take, as any modicum of thought on the topic would lead one to the punchless realization that we, by and large, are not happy. And so it is that those industries that are built on convenience have tried to get people to stop thinking altogether. The degree to which they succeed in this pursuit is the degree to which they are able to make money.

The Joy Market is a very profitable business.

It was founded as a single store a scant six generations before our narrative takes place, by a group of five ambitious young men who were completely, totally lazy. “How could ambitious men be lazy?” you may ask. It turns out that their distinct brand of ambitiousness was nothing more than an aggressive stance toward making their own lives as effortless and rewarding as possible. While most people have the drive to chase down this goal with whatever their id can muster, these gentlemen were very deliberate and focused in grasping for the brass ring that seemed to tantalize everyone and no one at the same time.

One afternoon, while inebriated beyond reasonable levels for not the last time that day, two of the men (tradition dictates that their names were Lothar and Jamin) lay on their apartment floor thinking of ways to get somebody to run to the store for them. They were in desperate need of salt and cigarettes, you see. They spent a good two hours in this state and in the end were unable to land an idea that would solve their quandary. At long last the third roommate came back, just as they were about to pick themselves off of the matted-down carpet. Since Troy, the third roommate, was stone sober at the moment, he reluctantly took on the duty of retrieving enough supplies for the long push into yet another invalidating evening of revelry.

Upon returning, he vowed never again to be talked into being that guy. His trip to the store had been aggravatingly slow, unconscionably expensive, and a real detriment to catching up to his by now sloppy drunk friends. As he expressed his resolve in these matters, his friends turned a sympathetic ear to his plea. By now there were four of them--Ignacius and Sifl had arrived in the time Troy was away--and as each of them had been in that spot before, they each agreed that the shenanigans must stop.

Thus, in their collective outrage they sowed the first seeds of the Joy Market. It started by them scraping together enough money to rent a well-located apartment on the first floor; the elevator lobby and mailboxes nearby assured a moderate to large amount of foot traffic. They bought cases of beer, cartons of cigarettes, bag after bag of chips, and whatever else seemed good to them when they were out of their heads. They hung a piece of loose leaf with the words “WE GOT WHAT YOU NEED” on the door, and the next Friday night the business took off like a rocket. They were out of stock by midnight, and sold out the next night as well. Word spread quickly throughout the apartment complex, and there wasn’t a moment in the history of their venture when people weren’t banging down the door. The proximity and friendliness of these gentlemen assured that they were the first choice in everybody’s mind, every time.

Within a few short months they had enough money to dump the apartment. This was made easier by the fact that the authorities had caught wind of their goings-on and demanded that they move to a commercially zoned building. They bought a closed-up bank nearby and expanded. Every night they exceeded their profit forecasts (drawn up by a hired accountant, they weren’t about to do all that math on their own). Soon one store became two, two became six, six became fifteen.

What made the Joy Market different from other convenience stores was the degree to which its higher-ups pushed the boundary of pleasing its customers. In their minds there was no length too far to go to keep their customers from having to wait in line behind a slow patron or make a difficult decision between barbecue or sour cream & onion chips. They aggressively ran innumerable focus groups to find out precisely what their clientele wanted. They pushed technology in new directions, throwing untold sums of money at computers that would revolutionize the very essence of shopping. The advertising department surpassed any seen on the planet, with a philosophy that it’s not about saturating the market, it’s under saturating that will convince people that what they want is really, underneath it all, what they absolutely need.

The five lazy friends made ridiculous fortunes all, and retired within twenty years of that fateful drunken afternoon. They each lived lives of ultimate luxury and decadence the rest of their days, and died peacefully happy at ripe old ages. Their celebrity eclipsed that of any movie star, musician, or hotel heiress alive. People kept waiting for one of them to run into some trouble with their health or personal lives, but it never happened. The collective consensus was that they had actually contributed so much to humanity that God himself smiled on their lives in such a way as has never been seen before or since. It comes as little surprise that their mystique and legend grew year by year until their hyper-aggressive stance to convenience became, quite literally, a religion.

Through the decades the Joy Market turned their strategy from many small stores throughout the land to fewer, larger stores. When the first of the Joy Market Megastores cropped up, some people accused them of betraying their original cause. The ringleaders of this shockingly vocal minority were summarily rounded up and accused of heresy. Their fates are unknown to this day. Since then there has been no challenge to the ubiquitous necessity of the Market’s services.

This was the Joy Market that Benton approached late one night in search of sustenance and refreshment. The building itself was a towering structure of seemingly monumental proportions. The hugeness of the building was nothing more than a trick of the eye, meant to convey gigantitude without using up more space or building materials than was absolutely necessary. The architectural design was the same as the seventeen other Megastores, a design which was developed at no small expense. The strong vertical lines running up the sides were bathed in an ethereal blue light; all things told it looked very much like a piece off the set of an old movie about the distant future. Long gone were the days of low, flat-roofed buildings with ugly fluorescent lighting and gas pumps out front. This was a new breed of convenience store, a message that was conveyed in every aspect of the elegant exterior.

The front doors were an amazing piece of technology. Clunky old sliding glass doors had gone the way of the buffalo in a flurry of ground-breaking engineering. The entire perimeter of the building was nothing more than one sleek, continuous yet silent waterfall. The water was poured at calculated rates from a computerized ring eight feet up the side of the building and fell into a slender trough in the ground. Motion sensors a little higher up detected not only when someone was coming, but precisely how wide they and the occasional cart they were pushing were. The water was diverted from the area of the approaching customer with a comfortable cushion to spare, and resumed its normal flow once sensors confirmed that the customer was inside. In its testing phase, the developing engineers proudly boasted that a mere one out of 4,500 people ever felt a drop of water hit their skin. It was the kind of feature that was entirely superfluous yet hauntingly beautiful, which was exactly what the Liberal Joyists held up as their ideal. The Honorable Reverend Roger Nimrod’s landmark book, Twelve Steps Is Eleven Too Many, referred to this innovation as, “nothing short of the gates of heaven itself.” This sort of detail was everywhere.

Midnight in the Velveteen Sector, Chapter 2.

Bursting out of the front door with more force than he anticipated, Benton was surprised with how invigorating the cool night air was. Late night walks were no big mystery to him, yet he could scarcely remember a night that seemed so perfectly sculpted from the very fabric of serenity itself. The sweet, cool moisture of a recent autumn rain collected itself in vaporous pools here and there; it swirled about him as he forged a trail to the store.

He was headed to the Joy Market, a convenience store of sorts that occupied one corner of a main intersection four blocks away. On account of the immense pleasure he found among the heavy-set stone buildings bathed in mellow orange streetlights, our protagonist ventured several blocks out of his way to pass by Clementine Park. The whole point of his sojourn was to rid his mind of the sudden, sharp emptiness it felt. The iron trellis that bordered the park, hung with the strangely savory ivy plants, would no doubt bombard his olfactory glands and spur him farther on toward his destination.

With earphones droning their ambient tones into his increasingly placated brain, and unconsciously stepping around cracks with a bit more bounce in his step, Benton rounded the corner and came in sight of the park. He crossed the empty street and slowed to a lazy stroll as he soaked in the wonder of it all. He reached out his hand to gently brush the ivy leaves as he walked; they were dewy and fragrant, beckoning him to drift and forget.

Clementine Park had been closed off for years. Its two giant iron gates were sealed shut long ago and the wonderful ivy had been allowed to grow so heavy that nobody could see inside anymore. Had one been inclined to push aside the foliage to see through, a thick row of hedges furthered the abandoned park’s fortress-like defense. Huge shady trees hung like a canopy over the block the park occupied, making the entire place a lush, impregnable cocoon. No one tried looking over the walls, no one ventured a guess as to what made the City of Cranville close it off in the first place. The populace of the neighborhood, including our man Benton, was happy enough to simply take in its ever-rejuvenating beauty.

His walk was going so well that Benton decided to come back this way once he found something tasty to drink. Thus it came as little disappointment to him to leave the park behind and press on toward the growing fluorescent glow not three blocks away now. The utter emptiness of Mission Hills would have been unnerving were it not so common. Several blocks away down a side street Benton spotted a nondescript form ambling in the other direction, and a car had passed by several minutes ago, but otherwise the night streets were desolate and comfortable. And so it was that Benton felt completely at ease as he stepped into the flood of bluish-white light that was the Joy Market.

Midnight in the Velveteen Sector, Chapter 1.

Midnight struck in the Velveteen Sector as it was always wont to do. The air was a perfect shade of autumn cool, twin red moons cast a pale blue hue from an otherwise featureless sky, and a stifling silence hung between the rows of quietly well-appointed town homes. There were no mid-sized sedans finding their ways home from a late night out, there were no terriers or retrievers making warning at invisible passers-by; in fact the only sound to be heard was a distant cricket. And even he was having his typical difficulties with the smothering darkness. So the night went on its normal way of instilling a vastly concerting sense of security and all-is-well-ness like a blanket across the pond of faded yellow domiciles.

On the other end of Cranville, in the Mission Hills that overlook the Bay, there was a problem. There were several problems in fact, but mainly one that concerns our narrative: a young man had awoken naught but twenty minutes earlier only to discover that he was missing the one thing that he treasured more than anything: a piano key.

This was not your typical young man, nor was this your typical piano key. Actually it was, or at least it started out that way. It once occupied a space on the high end of the ivories on a worn-down upright from his childhood. The piano was an unimpressive beast of a thing, devoid of ornamentation and dilapidated to the point of betraying what wood lay underneath its dull black paint. Whether or not the piano was shiny and dignified in its younger years was anyone’s guess; that ship had long since sailed. The only really remarkable thing about the piano was that it kept its tune astonishingly well for something so long in the tooth. The particular key in question came from a couple octaves above middle C, high enough to be pretty but not high enough to be annoying or childish.

The young man’s name was Benton. He was nineteen years old, and had been for longer than he cared to remember. Moons waxed and waned, tides ebbed and flowed, but Benton was perpetually, ebulliently youthful. There were no occasions to mark the passing of his life, nary a birthday or season to serve as a milestone on the road of his humble existence. He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a timeless brick building on the corner of Somna Street and Apathy Avenue. He had one of those faces that reminded everyone of someone else. He was slightly taller than average, slightly thinner than average, with a pale complexion and straight, medium brown hair. He always wore the same outfit of faded blue jeans with a hole in the left knee, olive green long-sleeved t-shirt, and unadorned navy blue stocking cap.

Like I said, Benton woke up from a fitful night’s sleep to find that his treasured piano key was missing. He wasn’t even sure why he noticed its absence—it had been months since he had tucked it away in a bedside drawer and promptly forgotten about it. There was a time (back when he was nineteen) when he used to carry it with him everywhere, a strange combination of affectation, conversation piece, and good luck charm. During really boring moments of his life he would pull out his pocketknife and carve intricate patterns and pictures on its surfaces. There was one carving of a particularly Basque-looking palm tree that he always was fond of, and he thought of this as a cold panic swept over him while he tore his apartment open from end to end.

It wasn’t a very big place where he lived, just large enough to hold what few possessions he refused to part with. Thus, it took him roughly twenty minutes to confirm what he already knew about his misplaced trinket. He dropped himself on the middle of his loveseat precisely at midnight.

There’s a certain sense that exists within most people that indicates, without the person even realizing it, how likely that person is to fall sleep at any given moment. Some might call this feeling awake or feeling tired, but it goes beyond that. A person who has been wake for two and a half days can still know that laying down is no guarantee of restful slumber. Benton’s “sleep sense” was throwing no doubt on the futility of sleep as the seconds crawled by into the early morning hours. Sitting unoccupied on his dilapidated green couch was as good as any psychological torture to him.

One time-tested method of breaking the momentum of a troubled mind is reading. As it just so happened, there was a recent general-interest magazine laying on the arm of the loveseat not two feet away. Benton flipped past a slew of seemingly uninterrupted pages of ads for pills and cars and gadgets and anything else that could possibly serve as a substitute for real, genuine happiness. Happiness, thought Benton. I could buy happiness if they had my key for sale.

His key. How could he have lost it? He was certain he last saw it in his nightstand. Had he moved it? Could it have been stolen? How long was it gone for? Who could’ve taken it? There was a long list of friends and acquaintances that had been in and out of his apartment over the last few months; questioning each of them would be painstaking and most likely fruitless. Faces and hazy memories appeared in front of his eyes as he labored valiantly through an article on the dangers of some common food ingredient. It was no use. Reading had obviously failed—time for plan B.

Another tried and true method for curing insomnia is simply to leave. Placing oneself in new surroundings is a reliable way to break demanding trains of thought and rob one’s bedroom of its ability to stifle mental relaxation. And so, with keys in hand, Benton flung on a lightweight tan canvas jacket as he scrambled down the stairs that ran through the core of his building. The corner store couldn’t possibly be far enough away.