I’ve had a pretty productive three weeks off the blog: I went to the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, spent a week on a remote Canadian isle cut off from all civilization, transformed a novella I wrote last year into a mess of cut-up pages and scribblings that might be a full novel once I type it up, and nearly filled the Kraft-branded notebook (featuring a bizarre poem that heralds a Mac-N-Cheese maker as a bastion of creativity). Here are a couple of the mote presentable scraps from that notebook.
1: A Political Cartoon From Judas's Perspective
2: A Bullet Point in the Middle of my Extensive Notes on Garth Greenwell’s Reading
My legs hurt.
3: A Story Written Entirely in One-Syllable Words for Some Reason
It is not hard to rob a bank. You don’t need brains or strength or an in with the right crowd, just a gun and a mask and a plan you stole from some crime film. You need luck, too, at least if you want to get out at the end.
Life after the deed takes skill, though. You have to live low and find a thing that’s worth it to do for the rest of your life. Lars took some time to learn that. When it takes no more pain to live, it’s hard to know why you should keep it up.
He bought a house in a place with class and found a wife with just as much. The wife, Kim, thought that Lars had made his cash in a high-stakes bet. In a way he had. She made art, and it kept her fed, so in a way she had too. Quite a pair, those two,
“I wish I could be like you,” Lars told her many times, most of them when he drank. “You found what you could do well, and keep it up. Me, if I do what I do well one more time, I might lose it all.”
“Not that I want you to,” Kim said. “But if you lost your cash, I would still love you.”
Lars knew he would lose more than cash.
For some time, he did not need more than love. Love can feed you, but food can get you fat. You need a thing to do, to use that love, to burn it off. So he had to give it one more go. The touch of the cold gun in his hand, just the right weight. The fear in the crowd, like all his fear was put on them.
The second time, Lars had the gun, the mask, the half-brain you need to make a plan. But he did not have the luck you need to get out at the end.
4: A Dream I Wrote Down in the Middle of the Night (Before my Fine-Motor Nerves Woke Up, Apparently)
So I just had this really weird dream that I need to write down. [Indecipherable writing that gets progressively larger.] AND I THINK IT ATE OLEK! [Indecipherable writing that I don’t think was even trying to be language by the end.]
5: Some Stuff I Wrote During an Unusually Boring Reading
Blessed flowing through my mouth. The dryness like flaking paper on my flesh dissolving under the fast-running fluid. What we need water for is interior, but we never have thirsty throats, thirsty stomachs, thirsty blood. All we feel is the need for trivial spit.
6: A Response to the Prompt “A Bus to the Moon”
Okay, I gotta crap out of a video game.
I used to be a real bummer at dinner parties, back when I thought game design was an art form. Especially when I described the knock-off Nintendo I worked for as, “A youth-centric creator of visual, interactive storytelling.”
But you can put lovely details in every frame of a game, and kids buy it and play it and forget it the same as they would have if you’d just crapped out at game. So screw it.
You need a final level? Sure. Let’s see, what better games can I steal from? Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Super Mario Oddesy, they all have a finale on the moon. If it worked for the best, it can work for us hacks, right?
How do they get there? Take a bus? Sure. Kids won’t know any better, and any critics who accidentally care will eat it up, say it invokes childhood whimsy. Maybe it really does, though. You really believe, when you’re too young to know better, that you could got to a bus stop and use your transfer pass to go to the heavens, to that shrinking and growing orb, not a lifeless mass of rock but a real place, a magic place, all the more magic because you haven’t been there yet.
No. Can’t get distracted with this stuff. Crap out a game. Just crap out a game.
7: Disappointingly Unfunny Thoughts on Humor
People act like you can’t care about something a whole lot if you joke about it. That’s not how it works, though. Sometimes the only way you can really understand or respect or love something is with well-constructed humor.
8: Really Not Sure Where I Was Going For With This One
Cliff chomped the edge of the quarter until it was sharp enough to cut flesh, then opened the print of his middle finger. Money was prohibited at the institute, as coveting and greed naturally festered when currency was present in any form. The cutting potential of coins was only an incidental concern. But Cliff had smuggled it in in the sole of his shoe, knowing it would be good for something. And it was. Not for buying something, as he’d expected. If there was a black market here, he hadn’t sniffed it out. No, the coin was good for making a blood pact with Margret.
9: A Chart of Feedback Reactions
9: A Response to the Prompt “Genesis is an Allegory”
I thought I’d be immersed in a world of high-class scholarly exchange, going to such a prestigious liberal arts university. Instead I’m nearly pulling my hair out trying to understand why my professor thinks Terminator: Genisys is an allegory for the human condition.
“It’s a really dumb movie, though,” I say.
“That’s not the point!” my professor declares. “Man mixing with machine rendered by digital technologies, the past story of the future affecting the past remade in the present, the ideologies swirling around Schwarzenegger’s governorships, not to mention the Biblical allusion-”
“Does it even count if the book of the Bible it alludes to is misspelled?”
“What would you rather have me assign a term paper on? Would you like to pick apart the filmography of one of your auteurs, your patron saints of pretension?”
“Yeah, that’s be pretty great.”
He sighs so despairingly. I wonder what’s happened to academia.
10: A Map, Presumably For Some Kind of Project, Though I Never Got Around to Writing What the Letters Mean and Then Forgot About it so Really I Have No Idea
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