On Writing and The Skiless Ski Trip

Someone recently asked me what I thought made a good writer, primarily wondering if writing is a skill that can be learned. Being that I’m lazy tonight and have other shit to do, I think I’ll post my reply as my daily “comic portion” of this blog (keep in mind that I don’t know if I’m a good writer yet, so my opinion could be bullshit):

I honestly feel the actual talent required to write is something that develops since childhood. You have to read to your kids, every day, from when they're in the womb straight through until they can read themselves. And not the same book over and over but a wide variety of books. Writing is 95% imagination and you have to jump start it early on. I also feel that writers need to read a lot in their teen->adult years, in order to hone their skills. And whereas reading fiction is fine, every writer should alternate fiction and non-fiction, they should have access to the source material and not just someone's interpretation of it. The purer the non-fiction the better. Teaching materials, text books, research papers and essays all make for great reading.

And then I think there's a good deal of life experience. You have to know how people act and talk. I don't know, I like to read psychology texts and papers to get a better understanding for what motivates certain personalities. I do a lot of writing from food courts and coffee shops to get some influence by passer-by conversations. I tend to act out my dialog on a tape recorder, play it back and make sure it sounds natural, get people's opinion.

And the fact is, with the exception of my father reading to me when I was a kid every night, I got every single one of these tips from several different mentors, of sorts. I think mentoring is crucial to developing good writing skills. There's someone out there that does it better than you and sometimes they'll teach you some great stuff. So, yeah, education of a sort is required to write, in my opinion, but I don't see it as much as a formal education unless you can't find a good mentor.

Feel free to discuss, argue, or print it out and wipe your ass with it. Now, onto the story. I kind of want to introduce you guys to the high school cast and the best way to get 90% of the important ones out of the way is to talk about our senior trip. By doing so, I only miss out on some of the major high school players.

Every year my high school had a trip. The trip was open to the entire grade but usually only the Med/Sci and Humanities programs signed up for them, not sure why. It generally translated to two bus loads on kids going somewhere. Freshman year we went to Killington for a Ski Trip, sophomore year we went to Virginia Beach. Junior year our trip was cancelled.

Those trips were fine, freshman year was pretty tame, the only story I remember well was when a theoretically (at the time) gay biology teacher rode the ski lift with G, put his arm around him jokingly and sang Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last”. I say theoretically gay because a year later we caught him making out with another bio-teacher, a moderately hot female.

The Virginia Beach trip I pretty much spent jocking Jessica, like I did my entire sophomore year. Two memorable stories, one of them was Ron (from the party) waking up Alex (plenty of stories) by whacking his dick across Alex’s face. The other one was waking up in a bed after a drunken night with a body in bed under the covers. Thinking it was Jessica, I put my arm around the mass of flesh and sheets to discover that it was, in fact, Ron (we were both clothed, it wasn’t like that…I don’t think). That trip was most likely the most homoerotic weekend of my life, like Luke being tempted to the dark side by the Emperor except, being gay isn’t really a “dark side” but I challenge you to come up with a better analogy that a 90% male comic-book reading audience will get. No offense, but you guys are dorks (me included).

So that brings us to senior year and a return to Killington that was almost canceled on account of rain. This trip was destined to be fucked up right from the start, when my boy Cooch and I chipped in for an ounce of dope, began smoking it in the school bathroom while waiting for the bus, smoked some more of it at the first rest stop, smoked more the minute we got off the bus and continued to smoke it until that night when we finished off the bag (granted, some of our friends helped).

To make the drug-fest worse, the slopes were closed on Saturday due to the rain. So we woke up early and started smoking other people’s dope. There was so much dope on this trip and we were constantly smoking blunts. We brought bongs, pipes, papers; making pipes out of beer cans and apples. We smoked so much that if you were to slit my wrists I would have bled resin.

Some guys weren’t into the constant doping, like Brian who never smoked, Jeromeo who was always with Brian, Collin who was busy trying to get with the ladies and others. A bunch of guys found an all girl school in the same hotel as us and tried to bring them over to our side of the hotel. Picture the scene. Brian, G, Cash and Jeromeo enter THEIR room with about five girls. Joe, Tal, Squee, Oli, Max, Ron and I are sitting around the room, high as fuck. De La Sol is playing on the radio and Cooch is standing at the table, a blunt in his mouth, a bag of dope and about ten joints in front of him as he rolls another one. He looks up at the no-where-near as fucked up posse and screams, “Close the fucking door, bitches!” They left; us dope-heads took over their room.

We didn’t sleep, either. We went tubing that night when the rain stopped. Tubing high is the best fun you’ll ever have (don’t do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad). We were doing demolition derby style tubing, taking breaks at the bottom of the hill to smoke a joint. We would prank call people late at night. One of my favorites pranks was when Andrew actually signed up to go skiing on Sunday (none of us did, Andrew was a “good kid”) and he requested a 7AM wake up call. We called him at 3AM and pretended to be his wake up call. Twenty minutes later he leaves his room, full gear and heads to the lobby. Ten minutes later he comes back, doesn’t say a word.

Saturday night the teachers tried to control us, they asked for five male volunteers. I volunteered because I was, you know, stoned. Chris, Alex and Jeromeo volunteered as well. It was for a beauty pageant, a team of girls had to dress us up like women. I lost to Chris. Immediately after the pageant it was back to smoking dope. We gave this kid Luis an oregano stuffed joint and watched him pretend to get high, never asking why his blunt smelled like an Italian restaurant.

I smoked my first cigar with Anne. I was a Philly blunt. I inhaled the whole fucking thing, not knowing what to do (I’m a bit of an aficionado know). We got Jansen stoned for the first time. A year later he gets arrested in Ithaca for dealing Acid. Don’t know if the two are correlated but I’m proud to be part of his development. Frank got stoned and “trew umps” the whole trip.

Even Jackie and Mary, probably my two closest friends in high-school (and through college), smoked a little. I don’t have a lot to say about them in terms of this story but they’re coming.

Things got a little weird when some friends’ of some of the girls showed up. They brought drugs none of my friends were into, llallo and H from what I understood. At this point the girls took over, doing heavy drugs while us guys continued to smoke dope. One of the girls, Jamie, wanted to hook up with me but I didn’t. I don’t know, I didn’t like the fact that she was doing the lla, as if the guy that smoked weed 24 hours straight for two days had any right to judge. But I did, and I didn’t even give her a reason, just sort of left her hanging. She didn’t really talk to me much after that, which was too bad because she was a cool chick. I think I felt like my intentions where in the right place, nothing wrong with morals, it was the way I handled it that wasn’t dead on, a mistake that I make quite often.

We all slept on the bus ride home, got home and slept some more. I would call it the best weekend ever, but I haven’t talked about Moosestock or Poconos II yet. Maybe tomorrow.

menthols are for high school, fanboy: Ashton Cigars

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