If, Part Two

If I knew what was good for me, I’d unsubscribe right now. I’d just do it immediately, without delay. I’d select that pesky RSS feed that brings me all the news from the amazing Richard Binder and I’d hit delete. Presto. Gone.  In all honesty, I should have done it a long time ago, but I didn’t, and so I’m once again lost, deep in a thrall that I can’t cure and can’t escape.

Not long ago, it was a Poseidon Magnum that had me going, as I wrote about here. This time it’s this sweet Bexley that sent me into a pen trance:

bex_imperial The news feed advertising this beauty arrived in my inbox yesterday, and I’ve been a hopeless, helpless mess ever since. Another beautiful pen I can’t afford (and let’s be honest, don’t really need), but that I’m stupidly drooling over nevertheless. I keep going back to look at the feed article. I think about it when I’m not looking at it. I click the link to the Web site and read the pen description — and, of course, look at all of Richard’s other wonderful offerings while I’m there.

I know from experience that it will take me a few days to get over this ridiculous condition, obsession, whatever it is. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep my mind off it by mixing some inks and playing with some of the favorite pens that I already own. And, yes, I really should delete that newsfeed, but I just can’t find the will to do it right now. Soon. I’ll absolutely do it soon … in a day or two … or a week … or next month. Really.

And speaking of Richard Binder, here’s a nice little article from the Washington Post that shows why people in the pen world hold him in such high regard.КартиниСувенириикониикони

The Best Kind of Store

If I asked you to guess my favorite kind of store in the world, you’d probably say, “a bookstore,” right? You’d be close, but wrong. My favorite kind of store is actually the kind that sells office supplies. It doesn’t matter much if it’s a little mom-and-pop (not that there are many of those left anymore) or one of the Officestaplesdepotmax superstores. Big or small, I just love ‘em. In the same way I could spend hours and hours browsing a wonderful bookstore — my second favorite kind of store in the world — I can lose myself in the aisles of an office supply store, wandering dumb and happy among the boxes of pens and reams of paper, the rulers and paper clips and notebooks and markers and binders and printer cartridges and wastebaskets and desks and chairs and copy machines and stickers and folders and tape and … well, you get the idea. Aside from pens and paper once in a while, I seldom need any of it. Nor do I usually have the money to make more than a small purchase or two. But that doesn’t matter. It’s the looking, not the buying. It’s just being there. That’s enough.

I feel comfortable confessing this rather unusual love affair because I’ve talked to so many other people in my life who feel the same way. We may be strange, but we are many.

What is it about office supplies that attracts us? Is it a memory thing? A throwback to that day each summer when we had to get ready for the start of the new school year and mom would take us to the dime store to get supplies? Maybe so. Maybe, as we browse along the hundred-yard aisles full of pens or compare prices on 5,000-sheet cartons of paper, we’re actually remembering the joy of a new pair of scissors and a shiny plastic pencil box.

My own best memory doesn’t go back all the way to my school days. It goes back only about 22 years, to those heady days when I was getting ready to launch the magazine Horrorstruck and needed to set up my home office. Armed with a five-page shopping list and a pocket full of money, my wife and I visited several wonderful office supply stores and ultimately loaded up the car with absolutely everything that I would need. To be brutally honest, it was probably more than I would need. It was certainly more than I needed to run a small magazine out of a small apartment in suburban Chicago. It was most likely enough to outfit an office at a Fortune 500 company. It was overkill, but what a way to go. And it was a pleasure that kept on giving, because after we got the stuff home and lugged it up three flights of stairs and stuffed it into the corner of the living room that was going to be the Horrorstruck World Headquarters, I got to unwrap everything and find a niche for it and organize it and then stare at it happily for a while, fully satisfied.

That wasn’t the beginning of my love affair with office supplies, just another stop along the way. I should probably be a little concerned that I can remember that day so clearly, but I’m not; I’ve long ago surrendered to the fact that I’m helplessly, hopelessly hypnotized by this stuff, that the thrill other guys get from power tools and fast cars, I get from a new pen, a pretty pencil cup and an unopened spiral notebook.

I’m thinking about all this today because my wife and I are going to the office supply store a little later. Given where we live these days, that’s quite a commitment — a drive of 50 miles each way. And we’re not going to buy a lot. We’re actually just looking for a little bit of cheap paper, some bargain stuff made from recycled sugarcane waste that comes highly recommended for fountain pen users. But of course buying the paper will be only one small part of the experience. The greater part will be getting lost in those marvelous aisles, exploring, navigating those narrow passes winding between  mountains of things I don’t need, can’t afford, and don’t even really want, but which I find wonderful and absolutely beautiful all the same.

Expectations

Because of what I got to do last weekend, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about expectations. What I got to do was run lights for the Missoula Children’s Theatre, one of my favorite annual activities. This was the fourth year in a row that our local Kiwanis Club hosted a visit from MCT, although my experience with the company dates back much farther, to the days in the early 1990s when I worked at a performing arts center in Illinois.

If you’re not familiar with MCT, you can learn a lot more by going to their Web site, but in a nutshell, here’s how it works: On Sunday night, a two-person MCT team arrives in your town with a complete children’s show — sets, makeup, costumes, scripts and scores — loaded into the back of a ridiculously small pickup truck. On Monday, they hold auditions for local kids, casting up to sixty or so of them in a musical production. The kids rehearse all week long, and on Saturday they put on two performances for the public. On Saturday night, after the second show, everything goes back into the pickup and the team is back on the road to the next town. No, the shows are not Shakespeare. They may not even qualify as truly top-notch children’s theatre. But they’re fun, cute, quick, entertaining little musicals. They are, in short, what they are: decent material produced decently, a blast for the cast, enjoyable for the audience, nice to see in any community and especially important in areas like ours, which are, to put it nicely, starving for the arts, theatre in particular.

The reason all of this makes me think of expectations is because of the reactions MCT invariably gets from the parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts of the cast members — and a few of the cast members themselves, come to think of it. They’re understandably skeptical about the whole approach. They look at this mob of five dozen unruly kids, ages six to eighteen, and think to themselves, “There is no way in the world they’ll be able to do it. Learn an entire show in a week? Dialogue? Songs? Dances? Entrances and exits? My kid’s never even been in a play before. He doesn’t know backstage from a back door. He’s going to learn all of this in five days? Uh-uh. No way. Not happening.” And then, the next thing you know, it’s Saturday afternoon at three o’ clock, the house lights dim, the music starts, and everything falls magically into place.

Kids are good at an awful lot of things, and above all, they’re amazingly good at meeting the expectations set for them. They have an uncanny, sometimes unsettling ability to rise or fall depending on just where we decide to set the bar. Set it low, and they’ll invariably sink to meet it. Set it high, and they’ll clear it just about every time.

Yes, I know that’s all a bit simplistic. We’re all familiar with the kids who melt down under the pressure of expectations raised too high, and those on the other end of the spectrum, the ones who inexplicably never reach the goals we’d like to see them achieve. But those extremes don’t change the fact that most kids, most of the time, will do exactly what we expect them to do, what we challenge them to do, no matter how difficult or even impossible it might look at the outset.

Inside that overloaded MCT pickup, along with all the sets and costumes, are a couple of things you can’t see: high expectations and confidence. MCT says to kids, “You can do this. You will do this. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t. You’ll work hard and we’ll help you and you’ll be great.”

And then, quite naturally, they are.

MCT 3
A proud Rumpelstiltskin cast after last Saturday’s shows. (Photo by Christi Ryan)

The Shadows are Coming Soon

Earlier this summer, I had the honor — and the pleasure — to write the introduction for Dave Silva’s new short story collection, The Shadows of Kingston Mills, which will be published soon.

The book, which features a brilliant Wayne Miller cover, is available for pre-order now. I highly recommend that you snag your copy while you have the chance. It’s a wonderful collection that introduces you to a very dark corner of the world, a place you would definitely not want to pass through in real life, the kind of place that’s really only safe to visit between the pages of a book. It’s also a collection that shows off Dave’s depth and range, and his knack for tweaking old-fashioned themes into unsettling new shapes.

You can order your copy right here.

Getting Back

As a thanks for all your patience during my web-hosting change and site rebuilding, I’ve posted a free copy of my (long) story “Getting Back.” This tale originally appeared in the Post Mortem anthology I edited with David B. Silva. Most recently, it was available for those who signed up for the mailing list over at the Olson and Silva site. As that site is currently being “reimagined and redesigned,” I thought I’d make it available for everyone here.

To find it, just head to the Extras page and follow the link.

Making Progress

A few links to repair, a missing file or two to find, and we’ll be able to call the restoration of this site complete. Normality, so to speak, is just around the corner.

Thanks again for your patience.

Please stand by

This site is undergoing some changes … well, okay, lots of changes. The biggest change is that we’ve moved to a new hosting company, which accounts for the fact that there is nothing very little lots of stuff but not everything here at the moment. That situation should be recitifed soon, but there are always a few snags in a project like this, so please be patient. Some rational order should be restored to this tiny corner of the universe soon.ikoni