The Question

How do you react to adversity?

My high school football coach would ask this question constantly. At the time it never seemed to have much impact. It seemed silly and over-dramatic. It’s an important question though. I find myself in difficult situations and his words will ring in my head. Over and over again. As if he wasn’t even talking about football. As if he wasn’t even talking about high school, or sports. It is not a question designed to create a better athlete, but a better person.

How do you react to adversity?

Let it sink in. Let it take hold of you. Ask yourself this simple question, and let it answer itself. Because honestly, you will never know. You can’t answer. Not truthfully. You can only speculate. Assume. Make a wild a guess to what you will do. But until look adversity in its cold, black eyes, you do not know. You can tell yourself exactly how you will react. But its a lie. And honestly, you know that. Nothing can prepare you. And if you are prepared, then what you are facing is not adversity at all.

How do you react to adversity?

This is the question I ask you. This is the question I ask myself. Finding the answer is not easy. Its not pleasant. But you will find it. If you want to or not. It will find you. Be it the answer you were looking for or not. The answer will define you. It will be absolute truth. And you will be forced to live with the results.

The Trepidation

Why do we let fear control us? It’s such a ridiculous notion. But we do. The things you fear most, the fears that tether you where you are, are they even real? You fear the unknown. You are afraid of things that have not happened yet. Maybe that never will. Things that may never come to be. That may never even exist. Yet you allow these fears to hold you in place. Chained. Bound. Tied to the world you know. Afraid of what lies outside of your own atmosphere.

Challenging fear means risk. It could also mean reward. But how often do you really look that far. How often do you peer past the darkness? Maybe the other side is brighter. But will you ever find out? How will you ever know?

It is fear that will deprive the world of great things.

So…where do we go from here?

The Climax

Fear. Excitement. Anger. Joy. Sorrow. Anticipation. The story’s climax is the peak of the action. The moment of the greatest intensity. The plot’s turning point. This is the time everything changes. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it will worse. But after this pivotal moment, nothing will ever be the same.

It’s strange. The nature of pain. Something ails you. A sickness that dwells inside of you. A wound, that although it may seem small, has cut you so deeply. It refuses to heal. It’s not the pain itself that is strange. That’s really the only part that makes sense. But maybe it never heals because you wont let it. This pain. This sickness. You refuse to let it go. Maybe you ignore it sometimes. Maybe you pretend it isn’t there. You pretend it doesn’t hurt. But the truth is, you always feel it. Truthfully, you embrace it. It’s real. And it is a part of you. 

But soon you arrive here. The climax. The peak. The turning point. In this moment everything rises to the surface. And nothing will ever be the same.

In this moment there is no certainty. There are no answers. Not yet, at least. Only questions. Everything has been building up to this moment.

Turn the page.

The Moment

Emotion is a funny thing. We feel something. Something that we can’t control. Maybe this feeling you have, this longing, is something you know can’t be right. Something you aren’t supposed to feel. This feeling, you tell yourself, it’s wrong. It’s impossible. It can’t be. It absolutely can not be real. But the unfortunate truth is it is real. And there is not a damn thing you can do about it. You convince yourself it isn’t true. You push it away. Bury it inside yourself. Deep where no one will ever find it. Especially not you. But some day the moment will come. The moment. It all surfaces. It erupts from inside you like lava from beneath the Earth, and it melts you to the ground. It burns everything. The moment will come. No matter how much you ignore it. This moment. It’s inevitable. And there is nothing that will stop it. This moment. You know it’s right. You know this is how the story is ultimately meant to play out. Not everyone is allowed the happy ending. And maybe you don’t want it, but these silly emotions, they tell you that you do. They’re stubborn. Emotions. You can tell them they are wrong. but they don’t listen. And you will never convince them otherwise. You simply have to accept it. And accept the consequences. Smile. Allow it to remain inside. Close the cage and lock it away so that maybe it won’t escape again. This is the nature of emotion. An uncontrollable animal. A beast. Clawing at your inside. Never to be tamed.

Emotion. It’s a bitch.

The Fallout

I’ve been falling behind on my daily posts. It’s not that I haven’t been taking the time to write my posts everyday so much as I have been having trouble coming up with topics to discuss everyday. I can warn you now that my blog will likely soon be filled much more random posts. Discussion of film. Music. Current events. Random rantings and ravings(unintentional alliteration).

This morning I thought I would talk about the title of my blog: The Fallout. I realize this may seem like a randomly chosen title, but surprising as it may be it does have reason. Two reasons, actually. The first reason. The simple reason is that it is an homage to one of my stories that I have been working on for a very long time called Welcome to the Fallout. A serial zombie apocalypse tale set in a ruined America after a massive global nuclear war. Not my typical genre, I know. Cliche, I know. But it’s fun. I think any writer needs to break out of their comfort zone and do something silly and ridiculous just for the fun of it sometimes. Hell, if I have this much fun writing it, maybe the masses will have almost as much fun reading it. Just maybe.

The other reason becomes slightly more complicated. I kind of like the idea of “The Fallout” as a metaphor for life. Not necessarily for my life in particular. But for life. It seems that just about everybody is living in the fallout of something. The bombs fell and devastated everything. Now you’re living in a radiated wasteland. Your mind and body changes. You learn to live in the new ruins. To live without what has been taken away. Destroyed. To make due with what has been left behind. You are left to rebuild. To recreate again a normal life, or what has now become the new “normal.”

Welcome to the fallout. Please enjoy your fray.

The Intangible Idea

I have been thinking a lot more about art yesterday and today. Not in the same context as I have written about previously, however. Before I mentioned labeling myself as an artist. A storyteller. A writer. About the idea of incorporating the role of being an artist into my personal identity. The idea of presenting myself to the world as an entertainer offering something to give back to the masses. Today I am more interested in talking about art. Not myself as an artist, but art as a driving factor. A great influence. And about other artists. Those who inspire. Those who lead the way down dark paths holding blazing torches high above their heads to light the way for all who are willing to follow. These people and what they have created with their hands and minds. That is what I am talking about today.

“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.” -Chuck Palahniuk

Obviously, my biggest influences are going to be novelists, screenwriters, poets, and directors. These are the individuals who have lit my path and sculpted my artistic prowess. Chuck Palahniuk. Ernest Hemingway. William Faulkner. William Shakespeare. Quinton Tarantino. Garth Ennis. Guy Richie. These are only a very few of the endless list I could give you in example spanning across a vast timeline. That’s one of the magnificent things about art. Art is timeless. Art never truly ages. It simply holds a place in time. Perhaps tells a story within the story. There is always something deeper to be found in any book, or poem, or film. If you are willing to scratch the surface, there will always be some treasure hidden just beneath.

Nothing is ever as it seems. You must open more than your eyes.

The Internal Conflict

Obviously I kind of took the weekend off from…well, everything. My friends(really just Sammy and Billy) and I talked a lot throughout this weekend about growing up and making decisions. A lot of talk about the future. Not the typical future talk full of fantasies and wishes, but serious conversation. Thoughts about what the future could hold, where we will be, and what we are going to have to do to get there. This whole idea of growing up. Maturing. We are all reaching our “Quarter-Life Crisis” as Sammy likes to call it. This time where we are all realizing that there are major decisions we all have to make that will make major impacts on the rest of our lives, as well as in some cases each others lives.

I know, at least for me personally, that there is still quite a bit of time before most of these decisions have to be made. This is certainly the time to start seriously considering them though. Until the time comes they will always be looming overhead. Dark clouds. More storms to add to those that are already typically raging in my mind.

Thoughts of the future do bring mystery and fear, but it can also be exciting to think about. Full of hope.

The Inside Cover

I have been thinking more and more about this whole idea of personal identity. Yesterday I wrote about the titles we give ourselves and give to others. The identity we share with the world. Badges we wear on our sleeves for all to see. Today I have been thinking much more about the other side of that identity. Not what we display to the public so much as what we keep inside for ourselves. Not that it is hidden. Far from it, really. This isn’t about secrets. Truthfully, this is about love. Passion. Obsession. This may still be misinterpreted. I am not speaking of romance or intimacy. Although it could certainly be included. But it is a much bigger picture.

“You know, all I’ve ever known are really obsessive passions, so it’s hard for me to imagine people who don’t have some sort of obsessive passion in their life, something that they have always dreamed of doing, whether or not they’re doing it. I think that everyone’s got an incredible passion, whether or not they admit it, or whether or not they’re even aware of it anymore. Maybe they’ve just completely forgotten the fact that they wanted to do this thing when they were a child. Or they talked themselves out of ever doing that or being that. But I have to think that everyone’s got that passion, and that much of our unhappiness and destructive behavior is based on not doing what we were created to do, for whatever reason.” -Chuck Palahniuk

I feel like I have lost touch with the things in my life that I really love. That is probably a big reason why for so long I wasn’t happy. I have recently been trying to reconnect myself with me. Writing has always been my greatest passion. For as long as I could remember I wanted to tell the world stories. I wanted to write books. Make films. Play music. Create art. Anything that told a story. That is the obsession. The love. Escaping life into a captivating movie, or a good book, or beautiful melodies is what I really live for. Sometimes life can suck. That’s a fact. For everyone. And art, in any form, has always been the perfect getaway. My dream has always been to give back to the world what so many have so graciously given me. Escape. Freedom. Peace.

A fiction writer’s job is to make you believe something you know isn’t true.

The Title

I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about personal identity. The idea of what truly makes you you. What makes me me. The whole concept that what you do is what you are. We assign titles to ourselves and to other to identify them. When we meet someone new we may ask them “what do you do?” Some titles we may want. We may be proud of. Others we may wish we could cut from the list, but they cannot simply be erased with a strip of white-out. Some titles we assign to ourselves. Tags we pin to ourselves in hope that others will see. They may be lies. They may be disguises. Maybe no one will ever know the difference. Hopefully no one will look past the shadows in our eyes. You may be labeled a liar. A fake. A cheat. Maybe you’ll live in a hidden lie forever. Maybe you’ll make it true.

Sammy asked me last night if I thought that “High School Cory,” in his mostly bare letterman’s jacket, long shiny hair, and scruffy goatee would approve of “Today Cory.” I had give an honest answer of “no.” In high school I thought that by now I would have graduated from PSU with a degree in physical therapy or psychology. I thought I would be in the best shape of my life. I thought I would have a collection of life-long connections from my prestigious fraternity. Maybe I would be an entrepreneur. A published author. An independent film director. A high school wrestling coach. A husband. A father. The options, the possibilities were endless in my mind, and each one was so exciting. There was no real plan, but there was potential. That went away for a very long time. My degree from PSU became an academic suspension. The best shape of my life ruined by daily regiment of extra-large pizzas, cigarettes, and discount lagers. Fraternities don’t accept probational students. Not much else happens for you when procrastination and laziness are your most pro-dominant traits.

Today I think “Dark Days Cory” would approve of me now. I can honestly say that if given the opportunity to go back and fix everything that went wrong, I wouldn’t change a thing. There are things in my life that are far greater than myself. I’m glad I didn’t go down the perfect path. I was broken down. Now I can build myself back up. So many poor decisions can lead to good results. If had never been suspended from PSU, I wouldn’t have moved back to Joplin, where my family and my best friends are. I never would have met Sammy(well, probably not) who now I don’t know how I ever lived without. I would have missed out on a lot of great memories and experiences. Maybe things would have been better down the brighter path, but I don’t want better. I want my life. My friends. My family. My memories.

I am a Writer. A Storyteller. A Chiver. A Best Friend. A Bartender. A Cook. A Student. A Son. A Brother. A Gamer. A Nerd. A man content, making the best of things.

The First Rule of Fight Club…

I just finished doing my whole morning routine(except for my writing. Obviously I am doing that now). Blah. Blah. Blah. A bunch of B.S. you have already heard.

I was having trouble thinking of something to do my writing on this morning, so I was whining about it to Sammy(like I do anytime anything is on my mind). She suggested that I write my post about why my favorite book/film is so important to me. She’s kind of a genius sometimes. WARNING. Possible SPOILERS. But then again, if you haven’t seen or read Fight Club I’m not sure why we’re friends.

For those who don’t know, Chuck Palahniuk is my favorite author. He is my hero. My role model. The single greatest influence on my writing as well as a great influence in my life. After I first saw Fight Club I was immediately completely obsessed. The film was full of fantastic performances, complicated characters, a compelling story, and deep sub-textual meaning. What’s not to love, right? So, my freshman year of college I finally picked up the novel by Palahniuk, and thus began the end of my life as I knew it.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Tyler Durden became my idol. The idea of Tyler was what I wanted for my life. Tyler Durden is the manifestation of everything The Narrator wishes he could be. Tyler has no rules. No limitations. No fears. No distractions. Tyler doesn’t value life by material possessions or monetary gain. Tyler lives to become a better version of himself. To disrupt the rules that confine him to an ordinary life. To create mayhem to upset the established order. Tyler’s goal is freedom. Ultimate freedom. To be broken down. To be stripped from the luxuries that confine us all to the mundane. Tyler is everything you wish you could be.

No fear. No distractions. Let that which does not matter truly slide.

I am realizing that I could write for hours on this subject. So, I will leave you with this for today, and will return to the topic on another day that I am struggling for inspiration.