Saturday, February 27, 2010

It was from a deal with the Devil


The month of February is almost done and I can say that I significantly failed in my goal to write something new every day. Well, perhaps not significantly. In any case, I built some fairly sturdy launch pads so there's an increasing chance that Snugglekitty won't be a pile of shit. To celebrate, here's yet another unrevised, rough draft of a piece that ultimately might not even go in the book.

2/27 No Title


When Sarah was very little, she had a sickness that grew from her crippled left leg, left her other limbs twisted and deformed. It kept her in and out of wheelchairs until she was seven and the doctors decided it would be best to amputate the leg before the sickness could twist her limbs further. Long summers in the hospital were passed with books about princesses who were swept away by their Prince Charmings, mounted atop white horses and Sarah wished that could be her life.


Years passed and Sarah’s mind grew while her body remained a husk, twisted against itself, against her. Her friends saw past this and loved the girl with the gentle smile whose eyes, smile were a window to her imagination and Sarah could see her stories played out in her friends’ relationships while she read in her room--not always alone; sometimes, when her arms ached, her nurse read to her, chaperoned her love affair with fiction.


The summer after her sophomore year, Sarah met Jesse and one look into his brown, meaningful eyes told her she had found the Prince Charming from her books. Then Sarah began to write. Poems and short stories about the imprisoned princess set free by True Love. A glance down at her broken body would bring her back to the world. How could he love this--lump of flesh?


On days she saw him, though, her hope in Love’s long shot was restored--he was gentle, kind, made her smile, loved her stories, asked for more. And, one day, sitting in the park together in the shade, he told her sheepishly that he had feelings for someone. Sarah’s books had taught her how to play it coy and she probed gently, her heart beating inside her broken chest, longing for the words it’s you.


And, as if to acknowledge how much time she had spent in books, the world played a little word joke on her: it’s your nurse.




Monday, February 22, 2010

It all floats


There was that day when the oceans rose and flooded everything and drowned everyone and the last two people left were an environmental activist and a racial justice advocate and the racial justice advocate said to the environmental activist "well, I guess you feel stupid for trying to stave off the inevitable" and the environmental activist replied "the joke is on you; the sea equalized everyone better than you ever could."



Thursday, February 11, 2010

No Chaser


"No Chaser," the Josh Hackett project will be officially released for sale this Saturday. Josh the Fiery Soul will read selections as will other members of Skull & Poems. Chase this reading with a high five!

Groundswell Coffee (corner of Hamline & Thomas), 7pm
Saturday, February 13, 2010















Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Plastics


I had two false starts today--the kind where I was like a page in and then thought to myself "this is boring and shitty and not worth revising into something mediocre." I'm much more okay with this draft and, while I'm not going to post every draft of I produce on here, this is a victory over the sub-par free-writes from earlier today. I should add that I plan to keep sentimentality to a minimum.

2/10 Flash Memoir ("Maybe Boo Radley Had the Right Idea")

Aunt Jan sent me a Power Rangers action figure for Christmas when I was twelve because dad had told her I liked “action figures.” He didn’t specify what kind (Star Wars) so, Aunt Jan, all the way out in Ohio, picked one she thought I would like. It maybe wasn’t my first choice of toy but I had a very inclusive community of Star Wars action figures in 1998 so the Red Ranger found a place in my rogue’s gallery of aliens and bounty hunters.


I have a set of oil pastels Aunt Dot sent me from Kentucky when I was nine. I drew her a picture once when I was maybe five and she said it looked “just perfect” framed next to her Calder print. It wasn’t one of those big, extensive pastel sets (it just had the eight colors main colors of the color wheel) but it came with this little booklet about blending the colors to make those eight into eighty-eight.


For every Christmas until I was fourteen, Uncle David sent me a book he thought I would like. My childhood bookshelf is full of Milne, Christie, Doyle, and Stevenson--books I regret not reading as soon as the wrapping paper was off but, for a lot of those years, I was working on building and playing with that inclusive community of Star Wars action figures; I’ve always favored the instant gratification of a plastic spaceship.


Christmas of 2009 was the first year I received more gift cards than than anything else. The Christmas colored plastics were accompanied with notes reflecting the passage of time and my maturity and how I was old enough to want to just pick out something I really wanted. For old time’s sake, I used one of them to buy an action figure. The lonely little plastic robot sat on my desk looking bored; all of my other toys had long been put into storage--along with my children’s books and art supplies.


I spent most of the rest of the afternoon looking at facebook and reading blogs.




Just Awful


Took a day off the the Sabbath. Also, I was hungover and my usual writing time was interrupted by football. You only think I'm kidding. This is a first draft line that actually sounds okay to me right now. It will probably meet with some revisions.

"Your broken stereo plays the sound of snow falling like your gentle breath and I long to catch snow flakes on my tongue."


The goal for this week's writing is to write something that is both upbeat and not shitty. I might also try to revise the downbeat pieces to make them not shitty.




Friday, February 5, 2010

Sorry, mom


This is my current pretentious self-diagnostic personal statement:

"Callous masculinity as a means of assimilation against a backdrop of hopelessness and institutionalized failure where meaninglessness ultimately supersedes romanticism."



Thursday, February 4, 2010

Look both ways before you cross that street

This is a first draft I vomited out about twenty minutes ago. It'll probably get revised.


2/4 Flash Memoir (code for "untitled")


There was this girl in high school we all sort of made fun of. Either she was going for the goth look or it just came to her naturally and she figured she may as well embrace it. I mean, she was still a total poser since she came from a good home and had probably had a fairly easy life. Her parents might have gotten divorced and, yeah, that sucks, but this was 2002; grow a pair. I knew her through drama club--this was back when I thought I had what it took to be theatrical or expressive or artsy or any of that gay shit. She always pissed me off.


I guess she thought I was cool; I was one of two asian kids at my high school (we had as little to do with each other as possible) so maybe she thought we were both outsiders and marginalized. Sure I got called a chink once or twice and this kid I only kind of knew made a joke about me eating a dog (for more on this, see “The Only Fight I Ever Got In In high School”) but, for the most part, I had friends and was fairly content for a high schooler. This girl liked to refer to me as “her favorite asian” which was benign enough to just ignore. I want to make it clear I was never actively mean to her or anything--I don’t think anyone really was. We were all just like, “write your poems about crows and darkness. Whatever.”


So, some time senior year, she was absent for like a week, I guess. I had just developed this huge crush on Aimee Keys so random poser-goths weren’t my concern. Anyway, when she got back, she had these new bracelets which seemed to be there to hide the bandages on her wrists but they were jangly and shiny so all they really did was let us all know she had something under them to hide. The scuttlebutt was that she had tried to kill herself that weekend but fucked it up because she crossed the street instead of going down the road--dumbass.


My mom got a call from someone else’s mom and sat me down to talk about it and, you know, if this was a story or something, maybe I would have realized how I should have been there to be her friend and I’d have made that step to hang out with her so she had someone to talk to about... how she really wanted attention, I guess. But that’s not the case; that girl was fucking annoying.


Last I heard, she had gotten married to an accountant and they had a kid or two.





Wednesday, February 3, 2010

I still tune in


This occurred to me while I was taking a dump this morning. I thought it was interesting but probably not anything to base any writing on. It's that the key difference between those old timey carnival side shows and the TLC channel is that, in the old timey carnival, the freaks could stare back.



Monday, February 1, 2010

28 Days, No Zombies


The month of February brings productivity in one piece of memoir written every day. March will be for revising. The first week of writing is gonna suuuuuuck.