March On, Revision!

Let's celebrate the month of March with a mean little story I wrote while I was feeling down about being an unemployed 20something with writer aspirations.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice when I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management. Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” I let my academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic relatives who were living comfortably in what seemed like boring existences asked why I was studying English, I would declare “trade school is for a recession!”

Then I graduated in a recession and the books I had read gave me little solace as I drifted from commission job to telephone sales to temp work and back. Kids who had learned trades were employed, married, had children and lives while I crisscrossed the country, building up more debt than life experience in forgettable, meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I lay, staring at the ceiling, wondering what kept me beating on, a boat against the current, borne ceaselessly back into mediocrity and failed expectations, I remembered the punch line to all of it: That teacher, Mrs. Baker, took her own life two years after I left for college because the cancer spread and, while fulfilling, her job as a teacher did not provide her with the means to effectively combat the sickness. I call that one a draw.

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.

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

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.

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.