“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
-Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

OK.

The car broke down again. Well almost. It suffered the same symptoms it did the last two times it broke down, so I high-tailed it back to school. So I won’t be going home. And I won’t be having my teeth drilled tomorrow.

I will, however, be going back to the garage where it was “fixed” and getting some answers from them. I have a feeling that will be like pulling teeth.

Apathy, brought on by eating too much pizza, makes for poor puns…

Torrie and I started out the weekend doing the least formal thing we could think of – staying up late and playing Mario Cart in our PJs…then watching Saturday morning cartoons in said PJs (its been years since I’ve seen a Saturday morning cartoon).

Saturday night, we did the most formal thing we could think of – we went to a dance/ball involving carefully quaffed hair (great job Kris!), dress, suit, and a dozen black roses.

I’m not sure which was more fun…

Tomorrow I’ll head home to do the least fun weekend thing I can think of – getting my teeth drilled. Barring a brawl with Mike Tyson, that fate should happen to my pearlies on Monday.

PLEASE FLOSS!

Torrie’s been busy building up my fan base – showing people my little prologue to my would be epic. She gathers encouraging comments and sprinkles them on me, inducing flight. Thanks Torrie. It’s definitely a motivator.

Since I have no refrigerator magnets…and since I only have this in electronic form. Let’s say this is the old refrigerator of fame. This is what her friend at work said about the prologue…

Hi Torrie,

Josh’s writing is very powerful. I think that he is brilliant. I specially love the ending! He makes one want to believe in miracles even though there is that dark bit of reality there… it is fantastic.

Thanks for the kind words Debbie.

Tonight I did some rewriting work on a story and remembered what it was I wanted to be when I grow up. Pre-writing work can get in the way of writing.

So now at the other side of a bleary eyed caffeine rush now dead, I have the latest draft of my story, “Why the Crow Cries.” I wrote it, originally, my sophomore year at Eureka and I think it was the second real short story I ever wrote (third if you count something from high school…1,299,333,740,945th, if you count some of the things that have cropped up on my head). The idea came from a passage of Dante read in high school. It’s also the story that turned into the long poem that turned into the Epic I’m trying to write. I figured it was about time to re-polish it and put it to rest. So I’m entering it in a fiction contest in the school’s writing journal.

All part of my campaign to get as many of my 27+ odd short stories (and they are odd come to think of it) before I graduate (especially any of the ones having to do with or acting as chapters of, my thesis). That way I have some credentials when I shop around for publishers.

That’s a plan.

My other plan is to get a suit.

I’m picking up my suit tomorrow.

Thanks Kris and Wil for coming with me last weak and helping me pick it out. How do you define friends? I define them as the people that go along with you for moral support; pointing and laughing at you when the suit salesman says, “We’re going to have to let your crotch out.” Thanks guys 🙂

It is a funny question though….

“We’re going to have to let your crotch out.”
“Don’t do that. He’s very mischievous and destructive.”

My crotch and I are going to bed now.

Night (or Day).

So Torrie tells me I need to read the writings of Kahlil Gibran. She left a book of his stuff in my room the other night. I started leafing through and reading from THE BROKEN WINGS. It opens with a chapter telling about how, for many, memories of childhood are precious and happy…but, for the speaker, how they carry pain and dark in the proportion. Then he explains why – and this particular section caught my interest and my eye:

“It is said that unsophistication makes a man empty and that emptiness makes him carefree. It may be true among those who were born dead and who exist like frozen corpses; but the sensitive boy who feels much and knows little is the most unfortunate creature under the sun, because he is torn by two forces. The first force elevates him and shows him the beauty of existence through a cloud of dreams; the second ties him down to the earth and fills his eyes with dust and overpowers him with fears and darkness.

The boy’s soul undergoing the buffeting of sorrow is like a white lily just unfolding. It trembles before the breeze and opens its heart to daybreak and folds its leaves back when the shadow of night comes. If that boy does not have diversion or friends or companions in his games, his life will be like a narrow prison in which he sees nothing but spider webs and hears nothing but crawling insects.”

Wow. Thanks for the recommendation Torrie. This is good stuff. And now, getting ready for bed, I can recall the spider webs and crawling insects of my youth. But now I have diversions…and I certainly have friends.

From Alex’s journal (farmkingdude85):

DIRECTIONS:

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 — first sentence
3. Book #2 — last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 — second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 — next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 — final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.
8. Cite the books used for curiosity’s sake.

And here’s what I got:

Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other-it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher” – an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. And that is why I came to you to get you to help me learn where the falcon was. They are all that remains of the greatest experiment ever conducted – to find the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. Most truly do I sign myself

SCREWTAPE

Here are the books I used…for curiosity’s sake:

(1) SMOKE AND MIRRORS by Neil Gaiman
(2) SELECTED POEMS AND TALES by Edgar Allan Poe
(3) THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
(4) THE ULTIMATE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE by Douglas Adams
(5) THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S. Lewis

The heat in Josh’s apartment does not seem to be working properly. Josh is starting to think that the authorities will find him frozen and dead, in a LONELY corner of his room, clutching a bottle of CAPTAIN MORGAN….

Josh’s car is sick again. Josh might be stuck in Springfield with LONELY. Josh is considering starting a threesome with LONELY and CAPTAIN MORGAN.

Josh just got hit by a tremendous blast of LONELY. A crippling blast of LONELY. He does not know where this LONELY came from. So he goes back to Eureka and maybe it will not follow…