TS and Maggie

Snugglekitty update

Figuring out layout for the stories, trying to decide if it's worth including pictures, realizing I need to complete some stuff, realizing other stuff is crap.

If you believe this will actually get published some day, clap your hands!!

$20 for 6000 words

Behind schedule on Snugglekitty but it isn't all from slacking off. I'm working on entering a short story contest. More on this later.

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed

The (almost) final draft of this piece in which I raised Mrs. Baker from the dead. My mommy said it was good.

Daisy Buchanan Can Eat a Dick

In my younger, more vulnerable years, my high school English teacher gave me some advice. I was thinking really seriously about going to college to study management but Mrs. Baker told me to follow my heart because “college is not a trade school.” My academic elitism get the better of me and, when my more pragmatic but less interesting relatives 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 did me little good 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 meaningless jobs with pay as miniscule as the impact I made on the world.

The morning I laid, 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, lost her job a year before I graduated. Last I heard, she was working as a cashier at Walmart. 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.

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."

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.

4/21/86-1/23/07; I miss you, sis

...Sliding Into Third

Here is a piece of a work in progress. Currently untitled, revised, or looked at too often. The line breaks will most likely disappear in a later draft but reappear if and when I read it out loud. I'm tricky that way. As a whole, Snugglekitty & Other Bedtime Stories will be an interactive work in that you can come back here and compare the final drafts of poems to early stuff like this.

...she’s such a cut-up

when she’s cut up

and when she coughs up,

sometimes it sounds pretty as

the songs that she suppressed, forgot

then improvised the chorus

but batted a lash and waved that ass

so no one seemed to notice.

At some point, maybe I'll post the earliest draft of that poem Jordan Porter called Twilight. He wasn't entirely off-base.

Remedial Stunting 101

We're working on a new rule for Skull&Poems that requires members to have at least one run-in with the Law during the writing process. For more on this, consult the American Music reader for a pretty entertaining story about how Josh, Jordan, and Jesse were run out of Tennessee.

In the course of the last month and a half, I have driven a little over 3,000 miles on highways through the Midwest, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest in what retrospect is sure to paint as a foolish, juvenile attempt to find myself. As I've been traveling, I've been writing toward a chapbook of my work tentatively titled Snugglekitty & Other Bedtime Stories. This sets up a loose parallel between myself and the American Music boys but with fewer amusing anecdotes.

Home-based in Arizona, the car I drive reflects the frontier spirit of the Grand Canyon state with its dark, tinted windows and only one license plate on the back. I've since been told that most states (and, by most, I mean the ones I have resided in) frown on tints as dark as mine and require a front license plate. I drove my car for a year in Minnesota and never had a problem since, I assume, the cops had more important things to worry about than to tell an out-of-state college student that his car looks like it might have a gun in it.

Then I came to Oregon and it is here that the anti-climactic, only mildly interesting story begins. If you've made it this far, well, you are more invested in this entry than I am. Driving to Target, I was pulled over by one of Oregon's finest. He told me that he pulled me over because he initially thought I was an Oregon vehicle and did I know that tints as dark as mine aren't okay here and did I know I needed a license plate on the front of my car and what was my business in this area anyway? Perhaps growing up in Eugene gives me an Oregonian look so I should have known better. We spent four or five minutes establishing that, no, I am not an Oregonian, I'm not employed in Oregon, and I hadn't really broken any laws. He seemed suspicious that I was "visiting my mom for a while" and asked what that meant. I watch a lot of Law & Order and am not sure I had to answer that but why make things more awkward? And then he drove off and I drove off and that was that.

Now, if I was a more interesting person, this would have led to my being asked to leave the state of Oregon or, if nothing else, detained down at the station while they ran my name and license plate for outstanding warrants. Maybe they would find out about the unpaid parking ticket issued in St. Paul this September and then it would all be over. Alas, it did not go this way so Snugglekitty & Other Bedtime Stories will not have an entirely true story about being run out of Oregon.

It will, however, have a wealth of other, more interesting, and completely true stories about my life and experiences. Have I ever told you why I don't date Asian girls anymore?

Title Track

The most recent draft of what will likely be the first entry in the upcoming Snugglekitty & Other Bedtime Stories.

Snugglekitty and Friends

Walking by the lake,

everything was grey.

“Hold my hand, I’m cold.”

I rubbed her wrist for warmth.

Only two decades made her

so frail.

I told myself it was fine,

told her she was beautiful.

Convenience or cowardice

(probably cowardice)

kept us from ever communicating beyond

bedsheets, whispered

Nothings between drops of sweat and listless sighs.

I told myself it was fine,

told her it was comfort.

Nothings strained to something when

Her body whispered

it was not hers alone.

She threw away her cigarettes.

I told myself it was God’s will,

told her everything was fine.

Walking by the lake,

two again.

(barren heart with barren womb)

“Hold my hand, I’m cold.”

I held my breath, felt the void,

told myself things were not fine,

told her it was God’s way.

Slashed herself up with sadness.

Paling wrists in darkened water

somehow restored hope.

“Hold my wrist, I’m cold.”

I held her hand,

told her everything was fine.