motes, vol. 1

the adverb ‘mad’, dreaming of buildings and a gavel, going to kokomo, and chance in fiction

welcome to motes, little bits of writing I’d rather put in a post than your Notes feed. they’re not Notes. they’re motes.

In middle school I moved to a new place and went to school and everything was ‘mad’. Or everything was modified as ‘mad’.

Not ‘mad’ like British ‘mad’, like lunacy, but as far as I could tell, this modifier simply meant ‘very,’ which was—to me—lunacy. But I had to play along. Though I had never heard this adverb before, its use would mark me as someone surely native, someone belonging. So I used it often, probably too much.

“That homework was mad hard.” (An easy win there.)

“Yo, she’s mad hot!” (Despite being unsure I liked girls yet; ‘Yo’ also an addendum to my vocabulary.)

Later I discovered this usage of ‘mad’ was probably transported by New Yorkers who had moved upstate, so maybe I wasn’t fitting in, but pretending I was from somewhere else.

Eventually, after middle school, ‘mad’ fell from the parlance. I like to think this was not a matter of lexicological decay; rather, the world became less extreme. Things were never ‘very’ this or ‘extremely’ that anymore, they simply were, and as I’ve gotten older, things simply are more and more. The degree to which they are what they are doesn’t matter. How they are what they are. When they are what they are.

Don’t use adverbs, they say. Exuberance shall be defiled, descriptors reviled—if the thing is the thing, that is enough. Least of all, you. You are only you. A shibboleth of yourself. Very sad is no different than sad. It’s redundant, and that’s sad.

Maybe this is true. Maybe we don’t need adverbs. However, I’m dedicated from this day forward to sometimes use the word ‘mad’ again.

“These chicken wings are mad spicy.”

“That music is mad loud.”

Mad madness.

Sometimes things I take for granted strike me as suddenly interesting, even if I know they are not, or probably not, minimally so anyway, but then I can’t help but waste an hour figuring them out. In this case—the courtroom gavel.

Sources on the Internet are sparse as to its origins; most agree it was probably a tradition of the Freemasons, derived from their lineage as supposed actual stonemason guilders, and in the courtroom, it became an American one.

I like to imagine the first angry Freemason in an unruly meeting of his peers, deciding to take up an instrument of stone masonry and slam it on a block to stun everyone into silence, and then the rest of them deciding this a good methodology.

Who is creating such traditions now that will subsequently be lost to time?

I want to strike a gavel as it struck me.

It’s safe to say I will never do so in a situation that matters; I’ll never be a judge, or an auctioneer, or lead the Senate. Never will I need such order. To employ it in my home would be shameful overkill. The Internet shows many low quality gavels available for purchase, mostly as costume accoutrement. I need to imagine these are cheap impersonators incapable of yielding order.

Only in my dreams could I deliver that resounding thwack-thwack.

Some powers are not meant for you, Clancy.

I always dream about architecture; or rather, buildings. I don’t know much about the craft or design of buildings, so I don’t have the eye “architecture” would imply, but I know how to behold their majesty and in my dreams I for some reason am frequently subjected to them in so many forms: schools, libraries, hospitals, castles. Homes.

Sometimes it will be “my” home, of course nothing like real life, but I am not lucid in this dream, and so home it is—stilted above a lake, nestled upon the craig of some mountain, floating on an islet in the tropics.

Sometimes it is my place of work, and when I’m there, no matter what, I have forgotten to punch in, and the dream is a mad dash through the halls of whatever magnificent building it is for a very out of place timeclock hidden away somewhere in a stairwell or grand foyer.

Sometimes it is a school, and I have forgotten my class schedule, and it turns out I have never attended math class, its location among the many other rooms a secret.

But when it’s my home, I never have to rush anywhere. I can meander wherever I like and frequently I fly around to survey the grounds from above like a drone.

It’s a cliche to write about dreams, or even speak about them, the presumption being, I think, that dreams are either all so universal as to be trite, or so specific and strange as to be meaningless to others. I imagine it’s common to dream of structures simply because the mind resembles one—rooms, alcoves, entrances and exits, foundations and gables and eves. It’s the easiest way for our subconscious to map itself onto a tangible schema. I find it beautiful each time, regardless.

The greatest guitar solo I ever played was for an arrangement of the Beach Boys’ Kokomo we played for jazz band in my junior year of high school. Or, I thought it was the greatest—recently I found a recording of it on my father’s hard drive and the solo itself is all over the place. Certainly I’ve played better since. I knew it wasn’t technically great at the time, could hear myself playing some wrong notes, occasionally out of key and out of time, smatterings of soaring greatness, sure, but mostly what you would expect from a teenaged non-prodigy who picked up a guitar to impress girls.

I thought it was great, though, because when I landed the plane of the melody back into the groove, the auditorium, half-filled with parents and siblings and significant others of all the players, went nuts, an eruption of whoops and hollers and applause. The biggest cheer the jazz band had ever heard.

Why? Watching it back, I saw my eyes are closed the whole time. My head is lolling, eyebrows flexing to every bend, foot planted on the amp, swaying back and forth. This was not performative, not an act. It’s unconsciously how I play guitar solos. I can’t not act like this when I play.

And I realized people are extremely forgiving when they can tell you are genuine, when they can see you are lost in it, presenting your truest self, and within this truest self, uncovering something universal—in this case, the ecstatic reverie of the guitar solo we all dream of as we air-guitar in the mirror. They were cheering for my triumph of trying, not my music.

Perhaps this is sad. Perhaps this is pitying. Perhaps, in earnestness, I have only uncovered an excuse for pathetic art.

Whatever it is, I think my writing operates within the same principal. Stop worrying about being cool, profound, or technically great—just close your eyes, take yourself to a made up island, and go for it.

As an “artist” or a “writer”, I am frequently fascinated with moments of chance and luck, happenstance causing tragedy or joy. This presents an issue as a storyteller because quite often these events can eschew the necessary fibrous tissue of narrative cause and effect, especially when seemingly random. There are a number of tropes—namely, cancer or a car accident—in the realm of morbidity, but also some in the realm of fortuity—winning the lotto, for instance—one can use to effect, especially when starting a story with them as the inciting incident. The real narrative follows what happens as a result of the event and how characters deal with it. What I have found difficult is marking a central turning point in the story with such an event.

The only way I have found inserting a random chance event in a story as effective is through integrating it with existing metaphors or symbols, which do not necessarily have to correlate to the effects of the real—the plot points which came before—but may serve to strengthen what is to come.

Strangely (to me), this sort of thing is usually forgiven in non-fictitious form. Telling someone’s story in a documentary, and halfway through they get hit by a car. Wow! How interesting. In a novel when this happens we think—what? How contrived. What led to the car incident? Was it truly accidental? Is there something about their character which makes them a poor driver? Were they distracted in a way relating to the other events? If things like this are absent, the reader’s belief is suspended, despite accidents without cause like this happening all the time in real life.

This is because storytelling is not mimetic, nor does it need to carry an exact verisimilitude, which is what is strange about Substack Fiction—it benefits from having both, because it is transmitted over the Internet. Why is this necessary? What is it about the Internet and the phone that makes us demand reality be the default that springs forth from it? I refuse to acknowledge this as the case. Inherently, we need not demand veracity first from the Internet. Always cast doubt.

Fiction, in all its forms, is about extracting order from an unordered universe. This is why tropes and cliches arise. They are the common patterns we can deduce from a mess inherently unordered here in reality and transpose into some greater metaphor that makes the most honest attempt we can of understanding anything at all.

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