Kyle is Currently Under Construction: Please Check Back Soon.

Whoa! It's been about a month since my last post, and I have no idea where it went. It also hasn't helped that I haven't had internet for the past two weeks. No internet equals no blog. But don't worry my lovelies, I have a very special blog for you....it's just not this one. The next blog will be coming very quickly, and for a special surprise for your unyielding patience with me, I will have...wait for it...AN ENTIRE SHORT STORY FOR YOU TO READ!

Take a moment to let that sink it, and I will see you very soon.

Kyle Moody and the Not Bummer Summer

Once again, here we are. This last week, my temp job ran its course, and I am again with the unwashed masses of the unemployed. I am not unhappy about this, in all actuality, I am quite happy. That job was boring, soul-sucking, and just pointless. However, I will miss the paycheck, and my current stress-level is slowly increasing day-to-day as I think about how I am going to pay my rent for the next school year, but somehow, it'll all work out.

I don't want to talk about such a trivial matter with you. In this post, I want to talk to you about what I did the day after I was done with my job. I went to the Philbrook Museum. Something I have been wanting to do for quite a few years now. Wednesday morning, I woke up and dressed fairly decent (no suit and tie, I assure you), and left for the museum. After being lost for about twenty minutes, I arrived. For those of you who haven't been, the entrance way is quite an experience in itself. When you first enter, you encounter this sculpture by Rodin:

Rodin is arguably one of the heavyweights when it comes to sculpture. So, once you see this as soon as you enter, you know you are in for a real treat.

After I left the ticket counter, I made my way to the main exhibit, a collection of Raushenberg's screen prints and paintings. I have to give kudos to the Philbrook. The way they arranged the pieces was not only tasteful, but they created a soothing atmosphere in the gallery hall. However, when I left the Raushenberg exhibit, and went into the main halls, that was a different experience all together.

I have come to the conclusion that I am a victim of terrible timing. Whether it be with jobs, writing, or relationships, I never can seem to get the timing just right. Wednesday was no exception. The one day I decide to relax and take in all of these beautiful masterpieces from across the centuries was the day it had to be field trip day. At least 500, screaming, booger-eating, little kids were there not paying attention, not caring that they were surrounded by art that is not only older than them or me, but will be around a lot longer after we are all dead and buried. That's not even the worst part. Since there are no ropes or protective casing around the paintings and sculptures, some of these booger-eaters were touching the artworks!!!!

Excuse me while I go and scream and vomit at the thought of what I saw...........


Okay, I'm back. But that day was not lost. When I entered the hall of modern art, I got to see my very first Picasso:

Beautiful would be doing this painting an injustice. I stared at this painting for what seemed like a year. It's a bewildering and humble experience to actually see something that you've only read about. I could see every brush stroke, every paint chip. I was literally six inches away from it. I could've touched it if I wanted to. I would be lying if I said that thought didn't cross my mind. I wanted to touch it, to touch the actual paint that Picasso used, to be connected to history. My heart raced with the idea, but I could not be disrespectful. We go our whole lives reading about things that are greater than ourselves, and when we are in the presence of such items, it makes the whole world stop,and it makes us wish to be part of that world. I am not ashamed of saying that I teared up a little bit.

I could go on and rant about the shame we should feel as a society to allow art to be cast on the edge of our collective thought, but I'm not. After seeing my first Picasso in person, not even those little booger-eaters or the fact that I'm unemployed could deter my experience. So, what makes you think I care where society places art nowadays? You're the ones missing out, not me. I'll gladly keep my art, you can keep your job.

"My name is Kyle Hays. I drink wine on Thursdays and Vonnegut lives in my pantry."

The Old Man and the Sea That Was Too Shallow

Happy Independence Day! Let us all celebrate another year of the crumbling of an empire with Chinese fireworks and European owned "American" beer, while stuffing our faces with three pounds of hamburger meat. Cheers!

I realize that Independence Day in this country is one of (if not the most) cherished holidays we have. I could spend this whole blog talking about how we shouldn't be so celebratory over imaginary boundaries on a map, but I'm not. Instead, I would like to talk about another day, July 2nd, and how that should be just as important.

Why July 2nd? That is the day that Ernest Hemingway, arguably America's greatest writer, committed suicide. The man was the epitome of what is commonly referred to as a "bad ass". He was a soldier, boxer, bull-fighter, lover, and so much more. So, when he committed suicide it came as a shock to the world that the man who idealized "grace under pressure" folded under it.

For those of you who do not know about Hemingway's suicide, it is as poetic as the stories he wrote. One morning, he woke up, poured himself a glass of orange juice, sat it on the table, stuck a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His orange juice never touched.

Here is one of my favorite all-time quotes by Hemingway:
"In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. "

Where am I getting at with all this? Hemingway wrote at the time what the world needed. His stories gave people a connection that allowed them to see that they were not alone in their troubles, their grief, their loneliness. On July 2nd, as I was reading a few of his short stories and drinking a nice, tall Guinness in honor of him, I couldn't help but think how badly we needed him now. Some of the older generations ( the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, Gen-Y), have rightly dubbed us the "Lost" generation. What do we have? We have no great war, we have no great music, and we have no great reformation on any aspect of our culture. Who are we? We believe that fame and fortune are just around the corner, that we will be the next big star, that we will be millionaires by the time we are 30. Well, sorry if I'm the first to tell you, but you're not. If you haven't realized it by now, but the only thing we have contributed to the world is "Jersey Shore" and the vast amounts of spin-offs from it. For that, we will forever be at the mercy of the gods.


I do not have some big rallying cry. I do not have any advice on how to change your ways, or to help you to feel not so lost. All I can do is lift my glass high in the air and say, "Here's to you Ernest. May you come back, finish your orange juice, and kick all of our asses."

P.S. The New York Times ran an op-ed piece about Hemingway that I think you should go and check out.


"My name is Kyle Hays. I drink wine on Thursdays, and Vonnegut lives in my pantry.

Creators and Destroyers, the Modern Day Odd-Couple

"...and I just looked out to the gulf, watching the water and hearing the seagulls off in the distance. The few clouds in the sky would pass over the sun, causing the landscape to look rather unattractive, but the sudden darkening of the water gave the gulf unaccustomed dimensions. Some of the outlines of the boats in the water seemed emphasized, but when they passed close to one another, they seemed to be blurred. Here and there, the water would open out, and unsuspected blues and whites would appear. The whole view, the boats, the water, all of it seemed to be organized into a series of shadows silhouetted against one another, so that the nature of it all, suddenly disillusioned, seemed to lose it’s oceanic look, as if that water was only possible in a painting." 

That is an excerpt from a short story that I wrote, called "Old Town Pier, This Way", a month or so ago that I am still revising. It is not the focus of this blog, however. I just wanted to see what you, my faithful readers (or reader, if that be the case) thought about it. The real purpose behind this blog tonight is that I wanted to talk to you about Creators and Destroyers. 

So, what are Creators and Destroyers you may be asking yourself? First, I need to open up to you and tell you a little about what I believe about the world. I do not believe in "good versus evil". I truly believe that every person is capable of good, and this includes the most retched, vile people there are in this world. I also believe that every saint is capable of evil. So, it becomes difficult for me to identify with what is good and what is evil. 

I have come to the belief that there are Creators and Destroyers. A Creator is a person who strives to make a better world for those around them and for those that will come after. This can be as simple as giving your spare change to a homeless person off the exit ramp of 169 and 71st street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or it can be as difficult as you try to pursue what you truly want out of life, instead of acquiescing to the pressures of the gods. A Destroyer is the opposite, and it can be so much easier to be one than a Creator. How easy is it for us to ignore those that are suffering around us, and continue our lives in its utter redundancy?  How easy is it for us to give up our dreams of being writers, painters, dancers, dreamers, philanthropists for the fourteen-dollar an hour job? Pretty damn easy.

You see, it is so much easier to be Destroyers. We were all once dreamers. We all wanted our lives to mean something; to make an impact in the world, but somewhere along the line, we lost sight of that and decided to fall in line to the whims of the gods. We lose our soul. We lose our inner stars, and we forget what happens to stars that fade out. They simply do not go away. They turn into a vacuous black hole, sucking all light around it into its inescapable pull. We drag others down with us. We turn into Destroyers.

To be Creators is terrifying. We will face the pessimism of the gods, their laughter, they will cringe at us, but when we start becoming Creators they will grow silent, and they will watch as we become something much bigger than ourselves. They will see love and hope spread as if it was a wildfire, and they will have adjust to the ways that we have dictated. 

So, where is this all leading to? I want you to become a Creator. I want you to remember your dreams of being a writer, a dancer, a painter, or just about anything you wished for yourself so long ago, and remember that fire you had in your stomach. Even if that fire is gone, and nothing is left but a spark, bury that spark deep within yourself, somewhere where no one can touch it; whether it be your critics, your fears, the Destroyers, or even the gods. Never let that spark go.

P.S. Sorry about the timing in between this blog and the last. I have been super busy with working and finding a new apartment, but I promise more blogs on a more consistent basis. 

P.S.S. I have been listening to a few new bands you need to check out. The Fleet Foxes and The Smiths are slowly changing my life, and I suggest you give them a listen.

"My name is Kyle Hays. Vonnegut lives in my pantry, and I drink wine on Thursdays."

Being and Nothingness With A Side of Fries.

Hello, again. It's been a week and as I promised, this post will not be as heavy handed as the last. I want to talk to you--internet--about a short story I have been working on. It is about a man named Olly. This man is boring. He is a mime who works a corner in Tulsa, OK--the same corner he has been working on for over ten years, the same corner his father worked. He gets slushie's thrown in his face, little kids kick him, and he lives in an apartment next to a Lithuanian couple who always seem to be having sex.

But this is not a comedie, nor is it a tragedy, hell, it's not even entertaining. It's boring. But that's the point. It's about Olly's existence with all its sheer, overwhelming tropes of disappointments and disillusions. He sees life as nothing more than just a compilation of bad jokes with bad punchlines. Olly is in a state of transition and his depression lingers everywhere he goes.

So, why would you want to read this story?

Good question. I don't blame you if you think it would be a depressing read. It is set up that way, but there is a method to my madness. If you saw Olly on the street, or standing in line at the grocery store, or walking his dog, would you stop to say hello? Why is it that we only care about the celebrities, the athletes, the rockstars, the politicians, and their opinions or what is happening in their lives? Why do we not ask the bank-teller or the cashier their story, or even less than that, how they are?

Olly cannot complete anything. Nothing ever fully happens to Olly. He is to a large extent a metaphor and (for the story in general) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear him describe a new technique in which he mimes that he stuck against a wall, gathering an audience, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, he never fully figures it out. Olly is a representation of all of us that are boring. We have a story to tell too.

P.S. If you want a copy of the story, just email me or message me on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/hayskm -- I will also try to put an excerpt up here on the next blog.

O Brave New World That Have Such Ugly People In It. Let's Start At Once!

"It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons--automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information; real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers. 

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself."

 Hello. I hope you enjoyed that. It is an excerpt from Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. I thought it was a good tone-setter for my first blog. With the advances in technology, people are becoming brochures of themselves. Whether it be facebook or any other social media site, people are putting their entire lives and personalities into convenient profiles for others. I am guilty of this, so no calling me a hypocrite, but unlike so many, I do not care for it. Yes, it is nice to be able to keep up-to-date with so many of my friends, but do I really need a website for that? Couldn't I just call them? And that raises an even bigger question of " Do I really want to know what they are doing every possible second?", and more importantly, "Do they even want to know what I am doing?"

These questions affect most of us. We sit and wait by computer screens looking for the next notification like crack addicts. Our phones are now a fashion accessory that must be taken with us everywhere for fear of missing a potential comment. I hate my phone. I hate your phone. I hate the fact I cannot have a conversation with one of my roommates without him checking facebook, or watch a movie and he ask me what happened or what was said because he missed it while he was checking facebook. I hate even more the fact that he calls me unsociable because I do not feel the need to take my cell phone to get groceries at Wal-Mart.  If this blog post has made him seem unlikeable, he isn't. Actually, he is a great guy, and if you checked out his facebook you could see that he likes music, has interests, likes books (even though he doesn't read), and even has managed to fit a few quotes on his page that he found funny or inspired.

But that's my point. How is he any different from you and me? You may look at my profile and see that I like Ghostbusters, Charles Bukowski, and that I worked in the post office at OSU. You have probably already formed an opinion of me just from that, and that's fine, we are wired to do it now. But do you know WHY I like Ghostbusters? No, no you don't, but if we were talking to each other, then I would tell you why and you would laugh your ass off, but you don't get that with the brochure Kyle, only the real one.

I am not here to badger you. I am not here to be a social conscious. I am just here to tell you that you and I are so much more than just 162 characters (or less).

P.S. Not every post will be about such heavy handed subjects. Most will be about my writing, or just whatever is going on around me. I just wanted to set the mood for us.