crumbsroom wrote:

Blurf. Barf.

Was this a coincidence?

So, I've been tinkering with a hypothesis, or a couple of variations thereof, if I may be so bold.
They all stem from a suspicion that our narrator is speaking from beyond the grave. 

One guess is that maybe our narrator is experiencing that moment of death when one's life flashes before their eyes. I'd need to go back and check whether that hypothesis could even be consistent with all the entries.

Another guess would be that we are hearing from a ghost, existing among family and acquaintances both living and deceased. I might similarly wonder if it's a community of undead beings... vampires, maybe. 

Then again [*shivers*], I might do well to leave well enough alone, and accept the mystery, lest I become too inquisitive with cat–killing curiosity. I've already spent more of my nine lives than I have remaining; of that I am almost certain. 

For some reason I can't quote that Rampop post without manually entering all the coding. Weird. I'm too lazy to do that at the moment.

Anyways, the Elevator to Hell song was just a coincidence. I don't even know why it ended up in this thread. Kismet!

There is also no formal direction any of this is taking. I'm just shaking things out and posting them before I can get lost in editing them into oblivion. I have a tendency, when given enough rope, to work on a single paragraph for months, which makes any kind of progress impossible. So I'm trying to completely reinvent my approach by just barrelling ahead before the enemy of logic can get its horrible nails at my throat. Maybe at some point a shape will take hold. Maybe not. But unless it just comes naturally and without any thought, this is all just going to remain and unfinished lump of words. Which might be what I'd prefer to be left with anyways. A kind of rambling, disjointed, manic, paranoid, angry conversation with myself.


 

Rock wrote:

I can respect that. I tried to dabble in creative writing a few years ago after having neglected it since grade school, and basically found myself stuck and unable to proceed without having a really good idea of where things were supposed to head, which combined with my total inability to plan these things out, meant the stint was short lived. Getting any words out into the page was a big part of the battle for me, and what you’re doing seems to be working for you.

Any artists needs material to work with. Painters have paint, directors have film, musicians have sounds and writers have words. So you just got to put the words out there. Not over think it, or your just going to keep less words and less images and less ideas from hitting the page. At least that is the philosophy so far.

But also, I began to grow envious of those other art forms and began to realize the artists I usually admire most are sloppy and imperfect and insular. Painters can throw their pant at a canvas, directors can amateurishly shoot on the fly, musicians can hump notes out of their guitars. And writers, more often than not, fret over being understood and looking for some kind of perfect balance in their grammar and diction and spelling. But that's not what I like, and so it became an increasing struggle for me to spend so much time getting results that I didn't even want. To shoehorn characters into stories where they didn't fit and no longer could act naturally. So it's not only become an act of just throwing things at the page, but decidedly removing as much connective tissue between ideas as possible. If I don't like a sentence, that might seem necessary from a logical point of view to further reader understanding along, I remove it. Let it be misunderstood. Which has really been the most liberating and important element of this project. To not worry if I remain in the shadows. To be unconcerned if the sunlight might kill any of this if it was ever lifted from the basement of underpopulated internet forums.

Rock wrote:

I’ve thrown myself back into writing longer reviews in the last two years, in large part because it takes out the planning element (you can structure your review around what interests you about the film and not worry about wrapping it up in a neat little bow) and is conducive to spilling words out into the page. Whether or not I come up with any insights is beside the point to an extent. I do find myself settling into certain cliches, sometimes deliberately, so I’ll try to push myself at times, but also not too hard for fear of stopping the flow of words. Quite frankly this is my only creative outlet, and I’d hate to ruin it by overthinking it.

Which is my long winded way of saying I can relate with respect to my own pursuits.

Thinking really can be the enemy. Not that you don't want what you write to be thoughtful. But get the thinking out of the way before you put pen to paper. Let the supposed smart stuff sneak into what you are writing organically. It can't help but show up at some point.

As for settling into stylistic reflexes and cliche's, I struggle against this somewhat too, but ultimately how can that not happen? Even artists as varied in their influences and approaches as The Beatles were, still somehow always made their music feel like they had written it. We always return to our own sound, even if we fight against it. But why fight it at all? If we have a good enough style, that is saying what we really want to say, why resist. Just embrace it and repeat and repeat and repeat until no one can bear hearing you say it even one more time ever again.

Or so says my enormous success as a writer who basically bails anytime I suddenly am expected to do anything but exactly what I want. A surefire recipe for stardom and wealth beyond my wildest imagination.
 

Part 2: My Favorite Sweater 

When Gramma Theresa died, my sweater unravelled. Must have started coming apart on the bus to see her body. Hadn’t seen the hole growing there in the morning. Hidden in my armpit. But now big enough to put my head through. Growing larger as I made my way up the stairs towards the viewing. Exposing my ribs. Or rather the stains on the shirt I wore beneath. Much too large to cover with my arm as I stood awkward near a coffee urn. The worst dressed until Denny arrived. 

A man about to be eaten by cats. He looked homeless. His face shrunken behind an enormous beard. Dusty ballcap on his head. His pants and jacket too big for him and hanging rumpled off his bones. On his feet, shoes he looked to have dug up from the grave of a drowned pauper. Brown and soggy. Making squishing sounds as he stumbled inside. 

My grandmother was dead but now here was another. At least of a sort. His black eyes seemed not to be seeing anything. As if they had been turned backwards and were not aware they were staring out at the world in front of him. Seeing only the kind of blackness you might find inside a skull. Staring at us as if he was staring at nothing. 

He too had come by bus. His teeth gritty with the dust of pills. A dented can of beer between his knees. And the smallest jangle of coins in one of his pockets. Not even enough to get a bus back to wherever he’d come from. 

Gordy had helped him up the stairs. Gordy with the muscles and long red hair. The oldest brother dangling from the arm of the youngest. Dragging him towards the coffin which he collapsed ontop of. Clung to and shook back and forth. Moaning and pressing his wet face against the wood. Growling if someone tried to lead him to a chair. Sometimes making noises as if he had fallen asleep there. Fingers twisting as if trying to screw their way into the coffin. Where his mother lay like some tiny, shrunken and dead mothball angel. 

I kept my distance from the deceased. Both of them. Stood somewhere with my sister in silence. Occasionally looking up to see Denny stumble past an open doorway. But he was nowhere to be seen when an unknown woman came to talk to my mother. A short and sturdy woman who looked a little bit like Bluto. Whose name was unfamiliar. But who said she had seen in the newspaper that Theresa had died. And how she was her grandmother too even though she had never met her. 

My mother whispered to me who it was. That we shouldn’t tell her that her father was here too. That it wasn’t a good time. Occasionally she would look around, as if she was looking for someone in particular, but never said his name out loud. Talked only of her adopted family. How she’d always felt unloved.  

She didn't stay long. But somehow long enough for my mother to begin thinking something was strange about her.  Slowly edging away from her towards the table full of cheese sandwiches. Not wanting to talk to her anymore. 

When she finally left, I felt sad as she gave no more than a glance at the rumpled pile of laundry piled outside on the lawn of the funeral home. How she didn’t seem to notice the hand reaching out from beneath this unpleasant shape on the ground. Grabbing at a tree. Fingers scratching at the bark. As if there was something trapped inside of it. That it thought it could help scratch its way out. 

SPORTS 

Part 1: Decapitation Lessons 

I probably screamed on the back of the fat lady. Trying to grab her hair but only getting handfuls of bathing cap. Telling her I would not stand for such treatment, up until the moment she sunk beneath the water. With me attached. Pulling me to the bottom of the pool. Having to keep my eyes open to see the hockey puck she threw down here. Had to grab for it. Had to find it. She’d keep bringing me down until I got it for her. 

This was the cost of learning to live inside your body. Would have rather been anywhere else. Getting changed for swimming lessons in the women’s change room with my grandmother. Steam and tits and my tiny bathing trunks. Then led to the pool where it took all manner of coaxing to get me in. Having to grab onto the edge or I’d sink. Then the fat lady would offer her back and I’d be expected to climb aboard. 

I would have kicked at the car door the entire drive here. Would have told them I was fine with drowning. Wouldn’t wear a seatbelt. Hoping for a collision before we got there. Hard and fast enough to get me airborne and head crashing through a windshield. The kind of movement I preferred. The kind I wasn’t responsible for. The kind I didn’t have to ride a fat lady to learn how to do. The kind that might eliminate my body altogether as my head continued out the front of the car without the rest of me. Rolling across the asphalt. Small and not so heavy. Almost certainly able to float without the need of swimming lesson.  

Part 3: Coach Cox and his Champions 

There were three men without helmets standing at center ice. One wanted the boys who skated fast. Another wanted the big boys who looked tough. And the one whose face I liked the least, and who screamed the most, just stood patiently for the rest of us. Waiting until everyone else had left the ice. Waiting for the ones who had fallen and stayed down. For the zamboni to push all of us into a corner of the rink. Make a heap of us for him to come and skate towards and look down at. 

We lay there, clumped together. Cold, but not moving much. My first team. At first just a tangle of shin pads and stinking hockey socks. But one that this man called champs. The kind of word that could get us to our feet. Even though his eyes were sad when he said it. 

As we got off the ice and stumbled towards the dressing room, bumping into the walls and each other as the sound of our blades clattered down the hallway, the lights in the arena went down. Leaving only the saddest of fathers sitting out there in the darkness. Pausing a long time before coming down to help us untie our skates. Realizing maybe they could make a clean escape if they didn’t put us back into our shoes. 

Part 4: Champ Shorts 

In class Mr. Pratt threw chalk at us. One time a shoe. Lifted desks over his head and shook them empty. Usually my desk. Usually screaming. A stupendous athlete of hating stupid kids.  

He probably died years ago. Had a bulging vein on the side of his head we knew one day would burst. Would watch it throb as he screamed. Grow big as a jug handle. Daring you to grab it. Make it explode at the faintest touch. Easy to imagine it spattering the faces of some other class years later. But thankfully never ours. 

Once in gym I made it bulge real fat from something I forgot. Scary fat. In the gymnasium he expected gym shorts and he had no more patience for my vanishing ones. Me standing in front of him and shrugging. Telling him they weren’t where they should be.  

He screamed so much. I bet he wanted to scream at my family too.  His vein growing fatter and fatter and fatter until I had to lie to save him. Tell him I knew where they were just to keep from getting drenched. To stop his screaming, which was always louder in the gym. Stop it from echoing and yelling at me over and over and over again. 

Coach Cox also yelled at me that year. His voice would echo the same way , but all around the hockey rink. And while I never listened much to him either, I somehow got better at what he was yelling about. Learned to skate. Became a scoring machine. Led a team to a championship, undefeated season. Crushing all the other teams full of no-skating fall-over bastards. Ate them for breakfast. Had a trophy at home to prove it.  

But this did not matter here. Not during dodgeball. No one knew who I was because I never talked about anything. Here I deserved the yelling because I was no one and had no shorts and the only way to stop the screaming was to tell him I would find them. I just needed time. 

I ran out of the gym into the hallway and buried my arm deep into an old chest full of lost and found things. Eventually, finding something all the way at the bottom. Fingernails scratching at it.  Something that had been there maybe a hundred years. That I now returned in my desperation to the sunlight and held between my fingers. Arm outstretched as far away from me as I could hold them. Letting them dangle and looking at them.   

Bathing trunks. Much too big. Tattered drawstring. Ugly green on the outside. And inside the inner lining, once white, now painted with a horrible brown crust that faintly smelled.  

“Found them”, I yelled out to the empty hallway. 

I didn’t know who I was anymore as I ran out to join everyone on the gym floor. Moving strange to keep myself untouched in these big shorts. Smelling like a century old turd from another boy. The worst kid in gym before, but now something almost supernatural.  

No one could have possibly suspected I was a superstar. Certainly not as they surrounded me. Everyone raising their arms in unison and ready to fire. Knowing the secret of what I wore. A moment of terror. Something running down my leg that wasn’t mine. Mr. Pratt beginning to drip from his temple. The smell of death in the air and a nightmare of dodgeballs bringing me to the ground.  

A champion felled. Never to be the same again. Except for being screamed at. 

THE CHURCH BEYOND THE TREES

Part 1: SAD NINJAS 

That poor old lady. We kicked her walls until the hair fell out of her head. Her face like a hundred year old baby telling us to keep it down out there all summer long. 

That poor old man with his nice hair and pink shirts. Had snowball fights with his hydrangeas. Throwing them at each other until he came screaming out of his door with a poodle under each arm. A blizzard of white petals drifting down upon him and his dogs and his pavestones. 

So many doors at the townhouse to knock on then run away from. But only the ones that didn’t have kids behind them. That we had no better use for. Only the faces of adults watching us through the windows. Looking worried. Only daring to relax when we climbed up the trees to become ninjas. 

We would leave the rest of the world alone while we were up there. Shaking the branches to see if one of us might fall. If ninjas always landed on their feet. Nothing to worry about unless you were standing directly beneath us. Not such bad kids until we climbed back down. 

Sometimes we’d stay there a long time and tell each other things we would never have admitted to on the ground. Plans to kiss all the pretty girls whether they wanted us to or not. How we couldn’t sleep at night and how sometimes we’d pray to God to kill people we didn’t like. Crying about things our parents had done.  

We'd sit up there and consider never returning to the real world below. Just dangle from the branches forever.  

But eventually our arms would tire. The wood would begin to crack beneath our weight. And we’d have to move slowly back down, hoping our confessions would stay up in the trees long after we’d left. Stay in this place where the rest of the world would never bother thinking to look for them. That couldn’t climb good enough to get them. That was too busy chasing us away to ever notice how frightened we were of any door we couldn’t knock on and run away from. 

Part 3: The Nice Streets Ambition 

When I was back on my street and pretending to be good, I had an old jar smudged with fingerprints I would take with me everywhere. Its bottom stuck full of old cookies stuck to melted chocolate and old sticky hard marshmallows that couldn’t be eaten anymore. That the fingertips of long dead relatives had brushed against but not been able to reach. That had been up in the kitchen cupboard long before I was born.  

Outside of the townhouse I was a smiling, friendly thing. Had a nice blue plastic car with a hole I melted in the back that was the perfect size to hold my jar. Would bring it from one neighbour to the next. Knocking on all their doors and holding it out to anyone who answered. Asking if they wanted some cookies. Three for a dollar.  

I was a good boy out here. Making money. Shaking a cloud of cookie dust into the hands of my neighbours. Wondering how much a dollars worth looked like. Filling their hands until they pulled them away. Telling them, always, to have a nice day. Then riding my blue car to the house next door and doing it all over again.