(no subject)
enough bout my sad existance i got a story:
I Won’t Belittle The Plot With A Phrase
I told him his eyes were green, or at least something along those lines.
“No, they’re blue.” He lashed out, “Oh my God! You’re always belittling other people’s thoughts and feelings. You’re an inconsiderate asshole! Do you ever consider anyone’s feelings when you speak?”
“Well if I did it would be pretty hard to be an inconsiderate asshole…” I finish the last retort before the hang up, which rings through my ears in English class.
“But take all those feelings of insecurity, insensitivity, inconsiderateness and turn them into something new and different, something you’ve never seen or heard before,” my English teacher shouts, almost falling out of the window.
I raise my hand. “But I don’t know what I haven’t seen…man, I don’t know what I’ve seen to even conceive what I haven’t,”
“What an idiot,” the class sneers portentously.
Alone together, she takes a step back and attempts to explain in more vague terms, “You need to find yourself. Here’s your assignment: think out of clichés and think out of the box. Write what you find.”
Problem: The only way to think out of cliché is in one?
“Exactly,” she says, reading my thoughts.
With so little knowledge and so much potential, I feel wasted. I have to write something prophetic so the aspirin-aged masses will worship me while I pretend not to want them because I can’t be a sellout. But I’ll settle for being a hypocrite.
As I tapped into the realm where the Bible and my thoughts collide, I realize everything’s been done before and we’re burning in senseless regurgitation.
“Tell me more!” my Creative Writing teacher says, “teach me how to write something edgy and new.”
“Well…” I start, “you take some letters, scramble them into words and somehow form a sentence. Rinse, wash, repeat until you have a paragraph. Copy/paste it on Google and if only 37 searches come up relevant then you’re original.”
A whole body of faddist writers with microphones surround me. “What are you writing about now, Oh Wise One?” they ask.
“At the moment, a story about nothing,” I say as they steal my copyrighted plagiarism.
They scan it briefly and throw it back at me. “This has no epiphanies, no character development. We can’t do anything with this.”
“I’m sorry,” I scream, “but the author does not feel that she could learn anything within the span of fifteen minutes so neither should her characters.”
Words that fall on cigarette butts and used gum that acts like cement to cracked sidewalks.
I couldn’t sleep. I guess my character learned something, but it was too simple to understand. And by the time I had figured it a third of it out, I turned on the television. Someone stole my idea, and added an epiphany. My dead dream of being a prophet fell on the main character, some sexy anorexic Dana who lured a director with her yoga movies.
I threw away my hopes of Paris review and I applied for a job as a bag lady: no calls back.
“It’s too competitive,” my counselor Mr. John Doe said, plus I couldn’t slice cocaine with a blade clean enough at the seminar, without cutting my soft suburban hands. Almost makes me admire all those children in Africa, who sell bread on the side of road, or anyone who knows where they’ll be in twenty years. Those butch-out Johns who join the reserves because if their friend jumps off a bridge…you know rest. But truly, he didn’t want - nobody wants - this.
His girlfriend whines at graduation, “I miss him, he’s in Iraq.”
“Well don’t worry. I doubt he’ll find those might-be-pregnant or might-have-a-bomb strapped on her stomach the least bit sexy,” I offer.
Well if she walked away I hope it was because of the lighting or the clock whose big hand struggled to climb from six to nine like that train, who thought he could, but he really couldn’t. No matter his disabilities, there were still only minutes away from the rest of my life, but there’s no Jay Leno reruns or failed thirty year old drunks holding poppers in one hand and their epiphanies in the other. Now I wished I stayed awake in Algebra as I scramble to plot my life like a graph; because if I don’t, someone else will do it for me. Casting me as CVS clerk meets suburban from the other side: works nights till eleven; comes home to South-East to take care of her crack-ho-pregnant daughter; one hour metro ride, no refunds, no transfers, rated R.
As predicted by fatis, I killed off my character. She was seventy anyways and had experienced enough nothingness for a lifetime. But I made her ending sweet, though her spirit came to a cross between Eastern Buddha and Western Jehovah. He asked her to explain what she had learned in relation to the meaning of life. So she wrote a five paragraph essay -1,721 words with paragraphs of twenty year intervals. She handed it to this spiritual being as a rat as small as a peanut stumbled in. The spiritual being put aside the confession and stared at this rat cover in dried stomach acid and asked what it had learned. Well my character laughed at this little rat, he didn’t even have thumbs, how could he possibly follow the formulaic limitations implanted though our existence?
Then the little being spoke. “I learned the warmth of a blade of grass when crystals fall from the sky and turn into layers of frost that burn the tip of my tongue.”
That spiritual being thingy took one look at this lowly creature, who was killed by a snake, and turned him into a bird. So excited by his new power, he flew; he flew in circles, around and around, until he crashed into a hollow pagan statue painted gold.