Here's a short post with a link to the game I covered yesterday for Sauk Valley Media. It was a beautiful afternoon to be outside, but it didn't go well for the home team the Sterling Golden Warriors. It might be behind a paywall, but I always encourage supporting local journalism.
Thanks for reading!
On Saturday, October 30, 2021, I’ll return to the sideline
to cover a high school football game. For those following this blog with bated
breath, you might wonder how that could happen. Didn’t I declare just a month
or so ago that I wouldn’t be covering a sporting event this fall. Well, things
change, people come and go, and my old friends find themselves in an
untenantable position heading into the IHSA football playoffs.
So, I signed on the dotted line to be a stringer
(freelancer) for at least one more game. I don’t intend for this to be an
ongoing thing, as I have come to value my free time. Plus, the weekday
deadlines are so darned tight now that I just don’t want to put myself through
that stress very often.
Game coverage is a unique beast, particularly at the high
school level. I remember the first event I covered was a boys soccer match
behind Challand Junior High in Sterling in the fall of 2004. The match was a
lopsided loss by the home team, and about five minutes into it, I realized just
how little I knew about soccer.
Afterward, I approached the coach, who happened to be a
former P.E. teacher of mine. My reporting career started with a question – from
my source. “What are you doing here?”
That’s the key question for every reporter on any story. “What
are you doing here?”
Consider that, and keep in mind some of the items below, if
you ever find yourself covering a game.
I could probably list things all
day, but I’ll stop there. I’ve never
considered myself a great game story writer. My strength was features where my
creativity could be put to better use, and I thought I rounded into a pretty
good columnist by the end of my run at SVM. I’ll talk about those forms another
time.
Anyways, I guess I am back on the
beat, let just hope I don’t get beat!
Note: Tuesday night was Prompt night at the Write On Writing Group in Rock Falls. I wrote the below based on the prompt: "You hear news of your next door neighbor vanishing without a trace." I decided to write a story in multiple short segments in hopes that the sparseness of the scenes would help to build the tension. I like how this turned out, and hope to maybe develop it some more. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to read it.
Gone
The rooster crowed, belting out it’s daily greeting like
nothing was changing. Annie stayed in bed, a film of sweat covering her face,
the weight of the damp air pressing on her like a rolling pin. The sun wasn’t
up, but it was already at least seventy degrees, something unheard of in
Illinois for late October. It would be another day in the 90s, the
thirty-seventh consecutive day to be exact and the fiftieth in the last sixty. Annie
wondered if people were melting.
***
The hens rarely laid eggs anymore, and the eggs they did
were like golf balls, hard and hollow. She scattered corn on the floor of the
pen, halfheartedly, they clucked with just as little enthusiasm. Routine was
the last comfort for Annie and the chickens. Only the rooster seemed to have
some gusto, tearing around with his breast pushed out and pecking the dirt with
such vigor that she was sure he might crack the dry ground open revealing a
gorge that plunged all the way to the earth’s core. Annie envied him, she could
barely eat anymore, her nerves had twisted knots in her stomach.
***
Eli arrived at 10, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of cutoff
jean shorts. He was thirteen, tan and lean. His yellow hair was long and
unruly, and his bare feet look battered. His eyes were pink and puffy.
Annie was trying to get milk from her last cow. The others
had either died or run off in search of greener pastures. Or just were gone,
just like folks around the country. Gone. As if God were plucking them right
from the earth and taking them up to heaven. Some reason though, Annie
suspected God didn’t have anything to do with this.
“Mama was gone this morning.” Eli said. “Same as papa last week.
Just gone.”
“You check the barn?” Annie said.
“You think I’m stupid.” Before all this, everyone knew Eli
was going to age into a real heartbreaker. Now, he just looked sad and angry,
the sort of angry that turns potential into disaster.
“No, Eli.”
“They just are gone. Papa was in the middle of fixin’ the
tractor last week. I went to look for a wrench he asked for, and when I come
back, he was gone, and the oil was running out the engine into the grass.
“And your mama?”
“She was frying the last of the bacon. I could hear her
humming while I was laying in bed. It smelt so good. I must of dozed off
because the next thing I knowed there was smoke all over the house. She’d never
just leave with bacon on the stove like that. It was burnt as black as
charcoal. I looked everywhere for her.”
“That makes six on the road.”
“Aye.”
“Did you go tell Charlie and Millie?”
“I was gonna, but I was scared. I thought for sure I was the
only one left in the whole world.”
“I guess we better let them know.”
***
Charlie and Millie lived a mile east in what they called
their retirement home. Their son, Angus lived in the farmhouse a farm block
over and managed the family’s three hundred acres and a hundred head of cattle.
At least Angus did until two days ago. Angus was gone now. Charlie was
unretired, he’d told Annie yesterday, but there was no charm or humor in it.
Just heartbreak.
Millie was a thinning, gray-haired woman, who’d already lost
one son to the war and a daughter to the big city. Since the radios and phones
and anything with an engine went down a month or so earlier, Charlie and Millie
didn’t know anything about their daughter. Just like all of them out in country
didn’t know what was going on with the rest of the world.
“I prayed for six hours last night,” Millie said, her hands
wrapped around a cup of cold coffee. She hadn’t taken a sip since making it
hours earlier. “I think whatever all this is has shorted out the prayer waves
to God.”
“Where’s Charlie?” Annie said. She hadn’t asked for coffee
or cookies, something the two women had shared almost daily as neighbors for
the last five years. No one had any extra to share. Besides, Annie couldn’t
eat.
“Over at the farm,” Mille answered. “Don’t know what for.
Angus let all the cattle go, and we can’t get the crops out anyhow without a
combine even if they weren’t all burnt to sunder.”
“Maybe Eli and I should stay here. Just till Charlie gets
back.”
“Suit yourself,” Millie shrugged and then didn’t say a word while
they sat there for the next hour. Annie and Eli set back out for her farm later,
not knowing what else to do.
***
Annie’s husband had died before all this, thank the Lord. A
sudden heart attack at the age of thirty-one. Healthy as an ox otherwise. Annie
hadn’t known how she was going to make it, but routine had got her through, and
she’d become the lone female farmer in three counties. She’d survived her
husband’s death. She’d made it through the tornado that cost her half a crop
two years ago, and even a bad case of pneumonia last winter. This though. She
suspected this would get her like it was getting everyone else.
***
Eli insisted in sleeping in the same bed, terrified if he
left her side that one of them would be taken. He’d had a pungent odor until
she made him take a warm bath and put on some of her husband’s old clothes.
They were too big, but at least they were clean.
“I don’t know the last time I really slept,” Eli said. The
room was dark and humid. The moon was big and round outside the window, even
its light seeming to add another degree or two to the stifling heat.
“Me neither.”
“When it takes me, I’m going to scream,” Eli said. “That way
you can run and try and see what happens.”
“Okay. What if I go first?”
“Will you scream?”
She didn’t know how to answer, worried she might just drown
in the thick air before a scream got out.
***
Charlie came in the night, brandishing a shotgun. Millie was
gone.
He walked off down the road and they heard a blast shortly
thereafter.
***
They killed a hen in the morning, deciding the meat was
better than empty eggs. It ran around without a head for three minutes and then
fell in the dirt. It barely bled at all.
Eli cleaned it of its feathers and carved off the cuts of
meat. Farm boys learned such things. She cooked the breasts on the stove top
and served them for lunch.
Neither of them ate a bite.
***
That night she woke to a scream coming from the yard. Eli
must have gone out to use the outhouse.
She rushed to the window, but couldn’t see anything in the
dark.
She called his name for an hour. And sobbed.
***
It rained the next day, fat plops of water were swallowed by
the scorched earth in mere seconds, and Annie took it as a sign.
She let the chickens free from their coup and led the cow
from the barn. She packed a bundle, what little she had left of value and that
was edible.
She started walking.
Leaving behind her life, hoping to walk until she found
someone, anyone, or until she was gone.
“Many is a word that only leaves you guessing/Guessing bout
a thing, you really ought to know.”
-
Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin
Maggie assumed changing her hair caused this. Clipping her
tangled blonde locks to a stubble and bleaching the remaining fuzz white had
felt right after the blowout with RJ, knowing how much her husband adored her
hair. Well, it wasn’t going to stick around much longer anyways, she might as
well have it go out in style. She didn’t stop to consider how every change
disrupted the fragile constitution of her son’s nerves. RJ liked to blame that
truck ride a few years back, but the fact was that their son was always emotionally
high-strung. She cranked the window down, letting the damp spring air into the
stale climate of her Honda. Her son was descending the stone steps of Jordan
Middle School, his dark hair matted to his skull. He wore a black t-shirt
tucked into his blue jeans, a pair of generic sneakers, and black gloves. It
was April, and still he wore gloves. Maggie knew that RJ would blow a fuse
seeing it. She was more forgiving of Richie’s picadilloes than her husband, but
she couldn’t help but worry that other boys would pick on Richie.
Richie opened the
passenger door, dropped into the seat, his bookbag falling to his feet, and
crossed his arms, hiding each gloved hand under the opposite arm. His face was
pale, his eyes dark, and his shoulder blades pointed sharply out on each side
of his t-shirt. He was slightly undersized for his age, and very undersized for
his peers, who were all older after she and RJ had been convinced to bump him
up a grade several years earlier before all the behaviors were noticeable and
before that damn truck ride. His grades never slipped, but his moods and habits
grew extreme over time.
“Well?” She asked. She was still figuring out the liberal
parenting techniques she had embraced after seeing how terribly her parents’
ultra-conservative approach had pushed her out the door when she was seventeen.
Well, her parents’ style had pushed, and the Led Zeppelin tour of 1977 had
lured her away for good. Those two forces combined had meant she’d seen her
parents twice in the last fourteen years.
“Well, Richie?” She asked again, when her first attempt
didn’t yield a response.
“Rich, I’ve told you, call me Rich,” he mumbled. She ignored
the statement and waited. “I was washing my hands.”
“For twenty minutes?”
Unable to watch him stare at the dashboard any longer,
Maggie turned the Honda’s key and the engine coughed to life. Pulling away from
the school, Richie cranked his window down and then made for the radio dial.
“No,” she slapped his hand away. “We need to talk.”
“I was washing my hands, that’s why I was late to class. We
were outside in gym, throwing that stinking germ-infested rubber ball around. I
had to wash it off.”
“For twenty minutes, Richie, that’s crazy? Are you smoking?”
“Call me Rich, and Christ, Mom, smoking? Shit.”
“Don’t curse at me,” Maggie could drive with one eye on him
and one on the road, it was a skill she’d mastered over the last few years.
“I don’t smoke,” his gloved fingers smashed the radio buttons, and
the speakers burst to life, playing her Houses of the Holy tape. The
volume was cranked, as it often was when she’d been out driving alone.
They came to a stop sign and to their right was a cemetery,
most known for its monument to a Civil War veteran, who had fought for the
South despite being from Illinois. Why anyone wanted to honor the man in Jordan
was lost on Maggie. She’d volunteered for a group devoted to the removing the
monument, but so far, they had garnered little support from the community.
People like their monuments and hate change.
“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” she said. “That was
wrong of me.”
“Why? I am crazy, that’s why you send me to Dr. Bitch.”
“Don’t call her that, and no, you are not.”
“Whatever, I washed my hands for twenty minutes and then I
told the teacher to get bent when he asked me about it.”
Someone honked behind them, and Maggie flipped her middle
finger out the window before pulling over to the shoulder and killing the
engine in the middle of a Robert Plant vocal. The guy behind them, driving a
big Chevy, kept honking as he passed, and the word ‘bitch’ trailed in the air.
She embraced the term, when it came to her driving and her son, she could be a
Grade-A Bitch, and she felt no reason to apologize for it.
“So, now you’re suspended?” Her voice came out hoarse.
“Yeah, two weeks.”
Quiet followed with only the traffic resonating in their ears
and the lingering smell of fast food assaulting Maggie’s nose. She tried
to be a good mom, a good cook, a good housekeeper, but often they ate crap from
McDonalds or Hardees in the car as she raced from one cause to another.
“Well, then you’re going to the doctor with me tomorrow?”
“Doctor? For what?”
“For me.”
“You?”
“Yes, honey, your father and I have been putting off saying
anything until we knew more, but you’ll know now, I guess.”
“What is it?”
“A lump, honey, on my breast.”
Intro: I have been wanting to incorporate a tie-in between
my blog and my Facebook group: Playlist Pandemonium. The group is a place where
the members generate a playlist each week based off a theme or prompt. I
thought about doing a Thursday ten, featuring ten songs from a single band or
artist, but struggled on how to make that a challenge for my writing, which is
the purpose of this blog. So, I thought I’d create a serial series inspired by
songs. I admit I cheated here a bit, as the piece below is inspired by a
NANOWRIMO project I did a couple years ago. I put 50,000 words down in a month,
but the overall story sort of floundered and I haven’t found the right angle to
fix it. The below is a new take, new writing, coming at the story from a
different point of view and new starting point. My hope is to add a new episode
every week or so and keep each post at about a thousand words. Hope you enjoy,
and feel free to leave your comments below. Dan.
Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special
https://open.spotify.com/track/28KTisZDzhDBALLSvRf4wv?si=b677a8e2ee1e48c0
“It's the Orange Blossom Special
Bringin' my baby back”
- -- Orange Blossom Special by Johnny Cash
Reckon it was when that Orange Blossom Special sped by his
trailer out on Highway 20 just after lunch that Friday in the fall of 1988 that
Ricky Dean Glenn felt the itch again. For two years, he’d been straight, maybe
not so much like an arrow but thereabouts. He’d done some scrappin’ of old steel
and such to get by. The kind of junk straight folks don’t have much use for
anymore, but don’t know what the hell to do with. Washing machines. Rolls of
barbed wire. Rusty farm implements. He took care of that concern for those
folks with their pearly white teeth and yards with freshly cut grass and
flowerbeds, the sort of lives that politicians spew on about being the American
fairy tale.
Ricky Dean Glenn’s life was no such fairy tale, no God-damn
way. He ate crackers with splotches of peanut butter on them for his lunch and
had two Marlboros for desert while sitting on his stoop, thinking about how
very big the sky always seemed now that he was out of the pen. Almost too damn
big. Sometimes his cigarettes would burn down and singe his fingertips when he
got to looking at that big old damn sky with its waves of white clouds and that
flaming sun. He’d curse, toss the cigarette away, but it wouldn’t be long
before the sky entranced him again. Too damn big.
He heard the truck’s engine rumble from miles away before it
streaked by in a blur of orange and cream broken only by the blaring
reflections of the sun off the windows. Behind the wheel was Joe Elliot’s boy.
Ricky didn’t know the boy’s name, just knew he was too damned young to be
driving such a cherry automobile. Course the boy’s daddy hadn’t gone to Korea like
Ricky Dean Glenn. No, Joe Elliot had foot pains, as Ricky understood it, a
symptom he supposed was caused by the streak of yellow down his back. Joe
Elliot stayed home, had a mess of kids, this one the youngest, and cleaned up
selling seed corn and crop insurance. Joe Elliot was one of those fairy tale
folks, which goes to show those folks aren’t all they are cracked up to be.
“Forget about it,” Ricky whispered, puffing on his
cigarette. The engine echoed in his ears. The Elliot place was just down the road
a spell, over the bridge that spanned the river where Ricky had once swum naked
with Pauline Appleton and taken her cherry. He suspected that then, at least,
but figuring back, she sure seemed to know what the hell she was doing more
than him. Ricky took another drag considering Pauline Appleton’s virginity back
in the day, the big damn sky, and that mighty fine hunk of orange metal that
had so recently passed his place. He’d look mighty fine behind that wheel.
“If you want it, just take it,” his father’s voice echoed in
his ears. Earl Richard Dean had been dead for more years than Ricky could
remember, but the bastard’s rough voice still growled from time to time in
Ricky’s head. Mostly when Ricky was drinking. Then the bastard was calling him
names while beatin’ the shit out of Ricky before moving onto Ricky’s mama. When
Ricky wasn’t drinking, he’d hear the old man’s sage advice. Things like, “Don’t
take shit from no one,” or “Might as well fuck those with nice things before
they fuck you.” Those were the sort of gems he’d get when they would escape to
the shack in Wisconsin each fall for two or three days of huntin’ and fishin’. Ricky
wondered if that old shack was still standing, be something to see, if it was.
His knees popped as Ricky rose, his cigarette disappearing
in the dust under his boot heel. Inside the trailer was a war zone of junk, discarded
clothes, and empty cases of beer, among the rabble was his white Stetson, which
he’d swiped after getting out of the pen, and his Colt, which he tucked into
the waistband of his jeans. Putting on the hat, he peered around the trailer
one last time and thought about Pauline Appleton’s breasts glistening in the
river water. Maybe that was the best day of his life. She’d been a beauty, one
all the rich boys had been chasing, but she chose the bad boy that night. They
always did. Well, sometimes they did. He’d gotten it enough, even tied his
hitch to a post for a time, but prison had ended that setup. He was all but
sixty now, not a boy, and women didn’t think of him as bad anymore, just reckless,
dangerous and over the hill.
Well, he wasn’t dead yet, so he wouldn’t say such a damn
fool thing as that day being the best. That Orange Blossom Special zoomed through
his mind. Mighty fine automobile. He supposed he’d been straight long enough.
Time to get right with a few things before it was too late.
“It’s the Orange Blossom Special. Bringin’ my baby back…”
He sang. He knew the Johnny Cash catalog by heart.
A semitrailer hauling a load of corn or soybeans whipped
past as Ricky Dean Glenn’s boots struck the gravel shoulder of Highway 20. He
walked with the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled just above his forearms and
his hat low on his eyes. He walked like a man with a destination, one about an
hour down the road by foot. He’d cross that bridge and that river, leaving
Pauline Appleton swimming naked in his bittersweet memories. He was after his
Orange Blossom Special, and one last day on the run.
“I don’t care if I do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die.”
When I was in college, I was recruited by one of my
professors to apply to NIU’s Writing Center to be someone that other students
could come to and receive help with school papers they were working on. The
position had a title like consultant or something, but I can’t remember the verbiage.
I think I took a credited course through one of the other instructors at the
Writing Center that was an in-depth look at writing form and criticism, and
before long, I was meeting with other students, and they were reading their
work to me while I made notes on a copy before me.
Now, these were college students, and many of them wanted me
to wave a magic wand and fix all the issues (namely grammar) in their papers. First,
I didn’t have said wand, and two, that wasn’t the Writing Center’s goal. If the
student committed some grammar miscue multiple times, we were encouraged to
point one out and tell them to review their work for other instances. My job
was to guide them to being better writers in whatever curriculum they were writing
toward. So, we talked about format, style, logic, consistency and occasionally that
ugly “P” word that happens as often accidently as it does on purpose for new
writers doing research projects.
The experience at the Writing Center opened my mind, and I
took my school papers and some of my fiction work to get feedback. Now feedback
is something I crave from people that read my stuff. Not just the “That’s good,”
or “Wow, I liked that,” but actual constructive criticism. “Hey, you’re veering
away from point here and here,” or “Your character is being inconsistent here.”
Most people are scared to give criticism, particularly in
this era of waving away criticism by saying, “Oh, that’s just your opinion,” or
“You just don’t understand.” But, if you’re going to be any kind of writer, you
must check your ego at the workshop door and realize no one gets it completely
right the first time, or even the second time, or the third time. If you want
to get better, you’ll listen and take those ideas into revisions and into future
projects.
I had a Sports Editor in my early days who arrived at SVM
with his guns blazing when it came to reviewing stories. He’d call you up
behind him as he tore through your articles, asking pointed questions sometimes
about every sentence, if necessary. I remember his first night, one of our part
timers wandered the building after one such session, throwing up his hands in frustration,
before walking out and never coming back. During my time at SVM, I found that
to be a common reaction from reporters who perhaps had went several years in
the industry without ever working for an actual editor, an editor with high
expectations for what was going to appear in his or her section. Most of them
couldn’t handle it, so they left, either giving up the business or trying other
papers where the need for coverage outweighed expectation of quality writing. The
reality was that no one was getting rich covering prep sports, so recruiting
talented writers to work late nights often on the road under deadline requirements
was not an easy sell, and you sometimes had to settle for what you could get.
My style when I became Sports Editor wasn’t particularly
effective, at least in hindsight I don’t feel that it was. I think I was often
too gruff and my running commentary with my staff sometimes undermined my
ability to nudge them to break certain habits in their writing, and I often
dwelled on issues without offering techniques for improvement. We had achieved a
level of success under previous administrations, and I mostly tried to maintain
that rather than aggressively cultivating even better writing from my existing
staff.
As I move away from journalism and into the world of providing
thoughts on fiction and other works by the members of my writing group, I try
to gravitate back toward the things I learned both at the Writing Center some
20 years ago and some of the lessons I learned as an editor at SVM. Here are a few:
Thursday, April 10, 2025 Time: 7:25 PM Song: Thrash Unreal Artist: Against Me! Mode of Consumption: Listening to our downloads on Apple Mu...
