| ramblings from the book |
[Sep. 30th, 2009|02:40 pm] |
Every day of winter break started out the same. I woke up, wandered out into my living room where Sarge was usually still passed out on the couch. I’d walk into the kitchen and make some toast, then I would go back in the living room and make sure Sarge was really still asleep and then I would use his butter on my toast and throw the knife in the sink as I walked back to my room. And I would eat the toast while smoking a cigarette out on the fire escape and as soon as I walked out and lit up I would think of her and sit down slowly on the cold metal and I never remembered my slippers did I even have slippers yeah my grandma gave me some fancy ones for Christmas but I think they’ve just been shuffled from one place to the next still in the box never opened.
After I finished the toast and the cigarette I was still hungry and empty and maybe the hunger was like a metaphor for what I was missing but I decided to go make more toast anyway but then I would realize that I threw the knife I used for butter into the dirty sink water and sure enough there wasn’t another clean one in the drawer and I just flat out didn’t feel like doing dishes because you can’t do dishes when you’re sad that is a fact. So I pour a bowl of cereal instead and then look in the fridge for the milk and see that the milk is one day expired and I try to decide if I am willing to risk it so I smell it which is always a mistake and then I end up pouring the cereal in the bowl back into the giant plastic bag and put it away and try to decide if I want to go to the store but then I realize that it is already two in the afternoon so I guess I might as well just order a pizza because if I get a pizza when I’m only kinda hungry then I won’t eat a lot of it and then I can put it in the fridge and reheat it for dinner so I don’t have to think about making anything or ordering anything. I think about waking up Sarge to see if he wants anything but then I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of displaced anxiety over worrying about someone else’s food and ordering it and figuring out how to pay for it since neither of us ever have cash unless we are going to the bars and then I’ll end up putting it on my card and he’ll say that he’ll get me back sometime but he never does.
One morning I woke up and I had this really bad toothache and I was all pissed because I thought I had a cavity and then I’d have to find someone to drive me to the dentist because I don’t understand the bus system and I kept worrying about it all day and then instead I decided to just try to brush my teeth so hard it counteracted the cavity but then a popcorn kernel popped out of one of my teeth and suddenly I didn’t have any pain anymore so that was that.
Sarge and I had told Tina that while she was gone for winter break we would totally clean the apartment and it would be spotless by the time she got back but I probably don’t have to tell you that instead we spent the majority of winter break drunk and bored. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|09:51 am] |
warning: this part has a sexy bit.
the story about roscoe is based on a completely true story by the way.
( The Underpart Is ) |
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| goin nowheressss |
[Oct. 26th, 2008|02:45 am] |
hi im drunk and copy pastin from somefin I wrote in class
"I'm going to ask Alex to marry me."
Craig continued circling the lip of his coffee cup with his thumb. Charlotte looked at her feet. The Feist CD played on without reverence for the awkward silence.
"Say something."
"I'm not sure what to say. I'm surprised."
"Why?"
Craig took a drink and furrowed his eyebrows. "I thought you would be the proposee, not the proposer." He stared at her for a few seconds before breaking into a grin.
"Seriously, what do you think?"
"Honestly? Charlie, you've only been dating, what? Less than a year?"
"It'll be a year in April."
"You're caught up planning my wedding. That's the only reason it's on your mind."
"That's not why."
"Then it's because she's vulnerable right now and you're reaching for some way of making her feel better."
"She told me last night that I'm her family now. I just want to make that official," Charlotte said into her coffee cup.
"I'm really not trying to bring you down, Charlie." Craig twirled some foam onto his finger and then licked it off the end.
Charlotte sighed. "You know how I was always afraid of things changing? My fear was pretty well-founded. Change sucks. Growing up is just as scary as I always thought it would be, except it's much less obvious. You don't realize it's frightening except in the quiet moments. Most of the time you're too busy to even think about how scary it is. I mean yeah, I guess some change is good. You've certainly flourished from it. Here you are, a matter of months away from living the American dream with a pretty wife who cooks you dinner every night. Only a few years away from two little girls who yell 'Daddy!' and attach themselves to your legs when you come home from work. If I don't marry Alex, all I really have to look forward to will be a bottle of Jack and my bleeding heart full of memories."
"You don't drink Jack."
"I'm being grandiose."
"And I thought the American dream was to make a family band that causes all the members to go crazy in their own special way," Craig said, grinning.
"Nah. The new American dream is to live the simple life. Wife, kids, picket fence. We as a society have gotten so far away from that. I mean, how rare is it nowadays to have the real nuclear family?" Charlotte pulled on her coat and tossed a few crumpled dollar bills onto the table. "As time progresses, more and more variations of family become acceptable."
"You make it sound as though it's a bad thing."
"I'm just saying that nobody thinks as a kid that they want to raise an adopted ethnic baby with their partner." |
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| revisiting the dr. greene story |
[Oct. 24th, 2008|12:35 am] |
This was the second character scenario I wrote for the psychiatrist concept story, but he got pushed to the side when I became more interested in Galen. This is still really rough, but I'm starting to see his potential as a character. The prose is absolutely awful, but that's pretty much standard for the entirety of the Dr. Greene story due to its nature. The entire idea was to be a story told in dialogue because that is the way a psychiatrist's visit goes. The problem with this is 1. the lack of real time character action can get tedious (breaking up dialogue is really important) and 2. the actual insertions of character backstory appears choppy and misplaced no matter where I put it.
In short, I like my original concept for a story about three people with only their psychiatrist in common, but the actual practice of writing it turns out a little more difficult than I initially thought. And of course, I have yet to find a real....core point of it. Alas.
Okay that's enough random babbling.
( Chris's story ) |
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| a poem that started out as 'can I write poetry using the word sphygmomanometer' |
[Oct. 5th, 2008|02:32 pm] |
She was called Branwen of the iris eyes and she plunged
Plunged
Plunged
Off the northern cliff while I ran screaming
She walks by and there is a compression in my chest like a sphygmomanometer
I claw at my chest, wanting to free that pressure that chokes and constricts
And she is there with a needle and thread
I can feel her touch burning against my skin and I look at my scars,
expecting them to
have turned white from the heat.
Pale blue lips and I'm crying with my hands in my hair.
With a kiss on the cheek I am gone,
smoke filling lungs
filling and taking away space
the space that she used to fill
Like a seagull floating over an ocean but keeping near the land, she
will return to me.
or I to her
I watch my life draining out of
me from the palms
Like Tremble Dancer's palms bled seawater. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|01:18 am] |
Just break open the clown and take out a little white tablet
To make the cloudiness go away
Talk about your heart being strong
And pop pop pop
Talk about intellectual ennui
And sip in the back corner thinking about the pretty girl who played the guitar
Get angry about trivialities
Because that's what's important
Isn't it? |
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| beneath the lights |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|01:01 am] |
Jagged edges floating sky with the breeze of fate and we are here below the face of G-d.
Take the lead, I'll move with you, invent the cues for falling in together.
Hate the sin but love the sinner,
Take my hand but scorn my fingers.
Moving you and holding me the sinews form and work together.
Language moves and fades; tangible entity caressing me
Your heart, my eyes, a world forgotten lies between us
And I am.
I pray for figures bending to the floor
"Scrape my sins from view!"
(swept under rug, under skin, under soul, under being)
To err is only skin deep. To air. To heir. |
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| writing exercise: creating unique voice |
[Mar. 26th, 2008|05:32 pm] |
It feels like summer outside.
This is the first line I write as I'm sittin' on my back porch cradlin' my guitar with a notebook on the swing next to me. On one of the three wooden poles holdin' up the roof of the porch there is a rusty old thermometer. It tells me that it's almost 60 degrees out. Rained all this mornin' and now it's pretty out. Funny weather.
"This looks like Blues 101," Kathleen says as she hands me back my notebook. I snatch it out of her hands and set it back on the swing.
"Hell. S'just my first try."
"I'm not sayin' that's a bad thing." She squats down on the floor of the porch in one fluid motion. I wonder how she manages to do that without hurtin' her ass. "Dunno why you want my opinion anyways. I ain' ever wrote a song."
A kid on a bike comes zooming past the porch. He's singin' something real loud, but I can't really make out the words. Maybe it's just gibberish, hell. A second kid comes by on another bike. I notice that both of the boys did a quick zigzag on the sidewalk in front of our house. They both knew by now to avoid the part of the sidewalk where the tree roots had broken up the concrete. Neighbors kept bitchin' at me to cut down the damn tree and fix the sidewalk, but hell, how's that my responsibility? 'Sides, the kids were avoidin' it. And anyway, couple scrapes and bruises never hurt nobody.
"Is it about Dad?"
"What?" I ask, even though I know what she means.
"The song."
"Hell. I dunno. I guess you could look at it like that."
She hums a little tune and enjoys the faint breeze that goes blowin' by. She pulls her bright red hair back in a ponytail to keep it from wavin' 'round in her face. Hell. Boys're gonna be crawlin' 'round this house wantin' her attention in only a couple years. Little Kathleen who used to climb trees is gonna be a damn woman soon.
"Anyway, Momma told me to tell you to wash up for supper." She stands up with the same quick motion. She's so spry and wiry; she doesn't even need to use her hands to hop up from sittin' Indian style.
"Yeah. I'll be along in just a minute." Kathleen opened the squeaky screen door and disappeared into the hot kitchen.
There's still a breeze runnin' across the porch. It lifts my long hair up and cools my neck. Maybe I'll finally get it cut. Maybe I'll try to look like a clean-cut young man like Momma always wants. Hell. I gotta be the man of the house now, don't I?
"Bobby! Supper!"
I grab my notebook and guitar and head inside. |
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| White Rabbit |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|12:35 am] |
lol wut
final writing assignment, which was "write something entertaining in under 500 words"
"You've just had some kind of mushroom and your mind is moving low, go ask Alice, I think she'll know!"
I hum along as I crumple up yet another piece of paper and toss it in the wastebasket. Nothing is actually written on the paper, but every time I start and fail at writing something on the computer, I like experiencing a physical aspect to symbolize my frustration. The fact that I had a neat plastic basketball net over the trash can doesn't hurt either.
The guitar riffs of "Plastic Fantastic Lover" begin, and I immediately tab over to iTunes in order to go back to the previous song for the tenth time that day.
"If you want to listen to one song over and over, why don't you just put it on repeat?" Trista asks as she takes off her glasses. I watch with amusement as she squints at her computer screen.
"You're half blind, or did you forget?"
"Funny. It's just habit." She rubs the bridge of her nose and then glances over at me. I quickly type a line of gibberish on the computer to make it seem like I'm working.
"Do you want coffee? I think I'm going to put on some coffee."
"No thanks, T." The moment she's out of the room, I roll my computer chair over to her side of the room and glance at her computer screen. I grin as I see the drawing in Photoshop. It is a white rabbit surrounded by psychedelic colors and a giant, warped clock in the background.
I roll back to my computer and begin typing anew. I imagine Trista dreaming of white rabbits tonight and waking up to paint them on the walls of our tiny two bedroom apartment. I imagine following behind her and scribbling bits of poetry that describe nothing but form and color beside her life-size drawings. As I write, the white rabbits slowly turn into other animals, and Trista becomes a goddess. She grants them life with her multicolored wand.
"Finally gotten something down?" Trista asks as she comes in with a mug in hand.
"Crap poem. Might be something after some editing."
"Gonna call it a night?"
"Nah, I'm still in it."
The next day we're in the study in the same positions again, but this time I'm looking over her drawing and she's reading my poem. In the end, everything about the white rabbit is cut out, and it is simply a trippy poem about animals and a sorceress who controls them. In fact, there isn't a rabbit mentioned once after the edits. I think of Frank O'Hara.
"I like the way it looks."
"I like the way it feels."
"The colors are great."
"The images it gives me are fantastic."
And with the same dialogue that always follows these sort of rituals, we go back to our computers and I turn on Jefferson Airplane again. This time, however, I hit shuffle and see where it takes us next. |
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| Writing Exercise - Romeo |
[Mar. 9th, 2008|08:46 pm] |
This was a writing exercise for my creative writing class. He gave us the sentence "I saw that look in her eyes and I knew what was coming next" and we had to write a story in under 500 words based on that first sentence. Here is mine. It is silly and bad.
( Romeo ) |
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| Vicarious |
[Feb. 22nd, 2008|02:32 pm] |
Posting this in its entirety. It's pretty long, but eh. Several places are supposed to be italicized, but I can't be bothered! The main problem with this piece is that it needs to be changed from exposition to scene. And it's sloppy in several places! Enjoy.
( Vicarious ) |
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| Her Deal |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|01:55 pm] |
This is the short story from my creative writing class. It still needs a lot of heavy editting, in fact, the entire beginning is probably getting cut out. The whole thing started with the beginning as a random character sketch sort of thing I wrote a while ago (which the few people who read this may remember and recognize as being partially borrowed from something) and then the story sort of went completely away from it. But I kept the beginning cause I thought it developed Elizabeth. Now I realize that it's mostly superfluous. Why I am Not a Painter, eh.
Also, these characters are unrelated to the Shannon and Elizabeth from the story I was posting earlier, I just used the same names cause I like them.
I guess I'm just gonna post it in short sections. Enjoy.
( Her Deal ) |
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| snippet about Galen that doesn't seem to go anywhere |
[Dec. 16th, 2007|05:16 pm] |
He's got a heart that'll never melt. He's got a heart that'll never, never melt. Shields up, shields up! Bar the door and keep your dukes up!
Galen secretly thought that people who were open about being "guarded" were some of the biggest hypocrites around. The night after his first therapy appointment he had been made to talk to his mother about it, which turned out to be an hour of her telling him about all the problems she had in life. She explained to him that she bottled up all her emotions constantly. Galen remained silent. He wanted to ask her why she was readily sharing all this information if she was so guarded, but he had learned long ago that it was never a good idea to question his mother. And so he listened and said nothing.
Galen had once asked his mother why she was scared to dream of God when it was salvation that she wanted. This was, of course, a line from a Bright Eyes song, but since he neglected to tell her this, she thought him very eloquent. She was also taken aback by the actual meaning of the words. Galen hadn't been raised as a Christian; his father claimed atheism and his mother never said much one way or another. But Galen always found his mother a bit hypocritical because she obviously wanted to believe in a good force behind things. She always told him that bad things happened for a reason. And when she got depressed, which was often, she would tell Galen that one day they'd be in a place where there was no pain, she just had to wait for it.
With atheism comes a certain emptying feeling that you're alone in the universe, and in order to really cinch that disbelief in God, you had to accept that bad things just happened, for absolutely no reason. That there's no comfort of a loved one going to a better place. That when things were unbelievably shitty, you either had to pull yourself out of it or stay down in it because there was no God to reach down and touch your heart, no divine being to hear your prayers for relief, no all-knowing, all-powerful entity to pick you up and drop you in a better place, where you're supposed to be. No guidance. No answers. No unconditional love.
It's no wonder humans have fucked up the world so much. The combination of having no god to step in and guide their path and the nut jobs who thought there was a god doing just that often kept any good from actually happening.
Galen had a God. Not the Christian god or any other religion's god, but his own god. He supposed his god held similar ideals as to other religions, but he expected nothing back. Galen did not worship his god, or even love his god, but still it was an ever present entity in his life. There was something inexplicably comforting about being sure that there was something otherworldly watching over you at all times, even if it never intervened. His god was surprisingly poetic at times.
It was a better system. Spirituality without demands. |
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| break from the story - a sort of poem sort of not thing, idk |
[Dec. 12th, 2007|11:46 am] |
I will retrace the steps I took in leaving right back to my front door.
Whisper the words of another story as my shoes that have seen more of the world than when I left climb the stairs to the old house that had been my home.
Is this place so far separated from me that I will be unable to recall it at all?
It's all so close, yet I know I am surprised to find my memories meaningless.
So far connected, yet ever a part of me.
The hopelessness and desire for escape that I felt so strongly take over once more and I remember why I had to leave.
I fear for all of these things, and they are almost enough to make me want to leave and never come back.
I remember those I loved. My escape is not enough to heal them.
My escape is the beginning because there are still so many of us that are tied to the past.
I have to learn to forgive myself for all the things that I will never be able to change.
I can't spend the rest of my life saying I'm Sorry to all the people that I couldn't save.
I have always wanted to save the world, and I have to learn that I can't do that by myself.
I hope that after time passes I can extend my arms and welcome that part of my life into my heart without any pain following it.
That is the only way I can ever move on.
If I try to deny the past, it will only consume me faster.
Once I can accept it, I can truly become more of a person.
And that is when I can begin to heal. |
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