Roc City Blue excerpt (Shadow of the Valley)

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Roc City Blue excerpt (Shadow of the Valley)

Ernest Living

Ernie Prescott drove the same stretch of interstate every day he was scheduled for work. It ran from where he had an apartment in the northwestern suburbs of Roc City down along the southern rim of the city, out to an office park in a town outside the city limits at the edge of the county in its southeastern corner. He disliked cutting through the junction that ran through downtown, preferring instead to drive a roundabout way that avoided the urban center. It may have been longer, but it allowed him the tranquility of listening to his compact disc of nature sounds. He enjoyed the ambient static noise of the waterfall track the most. It aroused in him images not of majestic natural spaces, pristine and untainted by the hand of man, but rather, he was imbued with thoughts of ceramic tiles. The sterility of a day spa or an in ground pool embedded into a patio landscape, absent of greenery.

His vehicle was a late model SUV, high enough to see over the concrete embankments that hid the views of the city from those in more stout automobiles. He passed over the golf course by the river. Its lush greenness was being manicured by the maintenance crew up so early. The pale blue dawn casting a shadow of the bridge over the back nine. But his eyes paid less attention to those vistas than to the parallel lines of the highway lane dividers painted on the concrete. They disappeared into the distance ahead of him, a distance he headed toward at a steady speed set on his cruise control. A distance that seemed unending no matter how long he traveled.

He drifted into the center lane to avoid merging traffic up ahead. His absentminded move cut off an old Chevy sedan. That driver laid on the horn, breaking him from his meditative state. He threw his head around wildly looking for where the other car was. It pulled into the left lane, the driver flipping him the bird as she passed. He could tell the driver’s gender from the black nail polish and rings adorning her fingers. Pewter skulls and onyx gems. The Chevy pulled ahead into the distance. He returned to his tranquil daydream of sterility. He could almost smell the chlorine.

Ernie pulled into an empty parking lot. The pole lights were still on, faint if not obscure in the growing sunlight. He walked into the two story building of the office park to where his cubicle sat in windowless silence. He turned on his computer, logged into the network, and began the day’s tasks of data entry and analysis. He worked for a company that ran reports for a market trending firm. The trends had to do with adolescent apparel and accessories. The firm supplied the reports to companies across the world, but mostly in the United States, by correlating consumptive data. It sent out scouts into youth culture to promote products and brands created by another division, and then gave the merchandise to the most influential of any given clique so the product would then be envied. The firm collected the date, sent it out to Ernie’s company to be correlated, and then sent back to verify its effectiveness. All of this information existed somewhere in his training manual, but Ernie never absorbed it. He went along with the tasks he was trained to perform without asking questions. He didn’t see the need.

His life was uncomplicated. His cubicle suffered from impeccable organization. He was unfettered in his daily routine in running the reports. There was seldom any interaction with other people in the office, if not altogether absent, as any report he ran could be sent over email to his direct supervisor – a man, or woman, he couldn’t remember, of whom he only met at orientation. The cubicle was in a call center that was staffed by overnight people, people he never saw as he would be finished with his work day before any of their shifts started. It was abutted to a wall, with two free standing walls pinned between adjacent desks, reminiscent of blinders for horses. While others had tacked cute images of Pac-Man resemblance charts and important call back numbers, Ernie’s desk was Spartan. He never needed to print paper, or call anyone, so little to nothing adorned his desk. In his drawers he kept antibacterial hand sanitizer, a box of tissues, and the lunches he packed at home into plastic containers. The containers held plastic bags. Inside the plastic bags there was typically a bologna sandwich he had slapped together that morning. It was a ritualistic performance each time he made one. A slice of white bread on the bottom slathered with yellow mustard, then a layer of bologna, then a slice of American cheese, then a slathering of mayonnaise, and finally, after placing the top layer of bread on the structure, it was cut at a diagonal.

Much of the things Ernie did followed a peculiar order of steps. In fact, the same way he made his sandwich was analogous to the rituals he performed in cleaning himself after defecating. Because of his fiber lacking diet, his bowel movements occurred only every few days, and the excrement was less compact than someone with a healthier lifestyle. The smooth muscle tissue of his intestines pushed out the refuse of food matter through his anal sphincter. Inevitably, there was residual effluvial matter which did not succumb to the force of gravity and muscle contractions. He had formulated a way to be as sanitary as possible in removing that matter from surroundings of his anal orifice. The origins of the technique were from a joke he heard once about how a man wiped himself after finding that there was only one piece of toilet tissue left on the roll. The joke went that the man folded the tissue into a square, tore a corner, opened the piece up and scooped the fecal matter with the tip of his finger. He then disposed of the tissue that protected his hand from collecting any feces, and cleaned under the fingernail with the bit he tore off. Ernie’s technique was nowhere near as grotesque. Instead of a square, he folded a single piece of perforated toilet tissue into a triangle. Using the tip, he scraped away any unwanted particles that didn’t make it into the toilet bowl due to their adhesive properties.

On the Monday he had driven in, he had taken a morning constitutional before getting in the car. He also did this before making himself his daily bologna sandwich for lunch. While conducting the cleaning ritual in the bathroom, he had managed to lodge a small amount of fecal matter underneath a fingernail. It was unnoticeable and evaded the antibacterial purification of hand soap while washing his hands after the act. In making the sandwich, a glop of mayonnaise collected on that finger. Without a napkin or towel at the ready, Ernie Prescott placed the tip of his finger in his mouth, sucking the condiment off. The vacuum that action created dislodged the feces trapped beneath his fingernail and began its unholy journey through his digestive system. The procreation of bacterial colonies not native to the upper digestive system set his homeostatic balance out of kilter. He was not affected for the rest of that Monday, but the visceral reaction came in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The work day ended, he drove back home amidst the midday traffic, drifting blissful in daydream as he drove home of the imagined spa, ignorant of the machinations of bacteria multiplying in his belly. His apartment was as nondescript as the office building where he worked. A small one bedroom, it held all the trappings of a typical bachelor – a television, a VCR, a new device called a DVD player – most every electronic device needed to sate tedium or slough off boredom. He entered the apartment and washed the container from his lunch. When he finished with that, he put in a movie he had rented from the video store down the street. The movie was of a man who suffered from insomnia and formed a split personality after a subconscious realization that his consumer lifestyle was unfulfilling. Ernie couldn’t relate. He was content with the material things he collected. He fell asleep halfway through the film, woke up at the end of the movie. Buildings were collapsing as the main character watched over the orchestrated destruction. He stopped the tape, turned off the television, and headed to his own bed for the rest of the night.

Ernie had a dream that night of a memory. It was one from his childhood when his parents took him out for Chinese food for the first time. The restaurant was new as was the suburban strip mall plaza within which it occupied. Chinese lanterns hung above each table. Strange characters of a language he did not understand adorned the thin paper veil at the table where he sat with his mother and father. He was there for his birthday. He had ordered something off the menu that he didn’t know what it was. It contained seafood, something of which his body was unable to tolerate. Neither he or his parents knew this when their server – a pretty girl that made his cheeks turn red whenever she came by to refill waters – came over with a slice of cake with a candle. His stomach was already turning itself over and over, as if tying knot after knot on an unending string of dendrites.

He was sure he was reliving that moment over and over. The edge of oblivion would be an inability to keep half digested seafood from covering a cute Asian girl. The sight of panic in the eyes of his parents as they realized the inevitable moment of bodily fluid percolating up his esophagus onto the unsuspecting waitress…

He awoke sweating and nauseous. The nerves in his intestines were twisted barbs. He barely made it to the toilet in his apartment’s bathroom to expunge the contents of his innards from both ends. He spent an hour confined to the small space, the expulsion of bodily fluids finding an amplified resonance in the wave type frequency of convulsions. When the urge to vomit and defecate subsided, he managed to retrieve anti-diarrhea medication from the medicine cabinet. By this time, he was already late for work. He logged onto his computer at home and sent his supervisor what he thought was an eloquent email stating that he would be unable to make it to work. A simple reply of OK was received soon thereafter. Feeling his stomach settling, Ernie went back to bed to sleep off what he could of the remaining agony that churned behind his navel.

It wasn’t a long sleep. He awoke to an absence of pain, the days light filtering in through Venetian blinds. He went to the kitchen and decided it would be worth the attempt to put down some cereal. He ate at his kitchen nook – a folding table and a pair of chairs abutting a wall. He finished the meal, put the bowl in the sink, forgetting to fill it with water as he usually did so that the dehydrating proteins would not adhere to the glass. Time passed and the bowl would cake with that inevitable milk ring.

He went into his living/dining room and turned on the television. The cathode ray tube let out a bass note as static snapped and an image came to life. The electrons being forced in different directions to hit the phosphorus mesh behind the glass let off x-rays in the tangential direction of their electromagnetically manipulated paths. At first, he thought he had left the tape running in the machine, that maybe it started playing after he hit the rewind button the night before. But the math didn’t work out, unless it had rewound and played over and over. Even with that theory the tape would need to be in the machine, which it was not. It sat atop the VCR in the plastic rental box. No, these images were something else. Something familiar but out of place. The camera panned out to show the skyline of a large city. He recognized it from the training manual. It was the same buildings that housed the market trending firm. One of them was on fire, billowing dark ash into a cerulean blue sky. He couldn’t hear anything. He just saw the images on the screen. He had left the audio on Aux for the movie being played through his surround sound transceiver. He grabbed a remote and flicked over the audio to the television. It was still too low to discern anything. Words were scrolling on the bottom of the screen. Something about an attack.

He was about to sit down, but his body was frozen as his eyes remained affixed on the images being projected on the television. He stood suspended above the sofa, bent slightly at the hips, but not far enough for gravity to take over. His ears were registering nothing but the lub-dub thud of his heart. Acids in his stomach dissolved the proteins and carbohydrates of the cereal. It was a heavy stone in his torso. As he watched the cameras cut between vantage points, collecting more and more perspectives of the buildings, a plane coming from the edge of the screen cut into view, then disappear. It made a silhouette of itself into the side of the building not on fire. Glass erupted outwards, loose papers precipitated from the heights onto the tallest buildings in the skyline and crowds below. His insides wrung out the breakfast he had just finished moments before.

Ernie stood staring at the screen covered in bits of bile, his mouth agape. A trail of spittle dangled from his lower lip onto the floor. His body gave way to gravity. He watched from his living/dining room sofa as the two buildings did the same….

Excerpt - Cherry Snow

He didn’t realize in that first year just how much of a toll the move from Bison to Roc City had taken on Jude. They had both grown up there, on opposite sides of Bison, but he had little family or life left there when he managed to get his first job out of college that paid more than just enough to make rent each month. It was an actual job, a job with a suit. She had to help him tie his tie for the interview, he was so nervous. They celebrated that night when he was offered the position – Assistant Operations Manager of Strategic Resources – it rolled of the tongue with an air of importance. They went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant after Jude got one of her sisters to watch the kids. That was the last time for a long time he saw her as happy as that, if he managed enough time to see her at all. The hours were cruel, and the commute even worse. Too many hours behind the wheel dead tired, having to pull off to the side of the road so he didn’t slip into sleep and veer into oncoming traffic or slide off into a ditch. He stayed at a hotel in Roc City a few times in the first few months. They had to wait until he was able to get some vacation time in order to house hunt. It took them a few weeks to finally find a place – an American Four Square on the southwest side of the city.

The house was so much larger than their apartment back in Bison. Four bedrooms, a front porch, a two car garage. The kids found endless amusement with the laundry shoot and attic room that was just paperboard and no insulation, something he’d end up tearing down when the kids outgrew the need for a private place they were willing to share. On a weekend a few months after they had moved in, Peter built a sandbox for the kids to play in by the fence at the back of the yard. The children loved to play there, and Jude liked that she could see them through the kitchen window if she had to prepare dinner while they were outside playing. And they would play for hours in the cicada buzz of summer evenings, well into the dusk. He and Jude would sit on the back steps and watch them run around, pulling dandelions from the edge of an unkempt garden thick with ivy and patches of grass where they hadn’t the time to plant anything.

An older black couple lived in the house whose driveway ran parallel with the fence. They had raised their kids already, were enjoying a quiet retirement, the wife tending to a well manicured garden, the husband often washing his ’57 Bel Air – a car he had saved all his life to own and enjoy, Peter found out one random summer weekend while they shared a few beers along the fence. Peter was out grilling some hamburgers for the family dinner. He was enjoying a can of Piels and offered one to his backyard neighbor waxing the hood of the Chevy and working up a sweat. They got to talking and found out they had a lot in common, especial an interest in golf. A sport Peter was desperate to improve upon to impress the brass at work, the company often taking clients out to The Oaks Country Club in an effort to woo them into a contract.

The man’s name was Clarence, his wife’s was Bella. They had lived in that neighborhood for over forty years. They bounced around a few houses around Roc City but they always felt like that neighborhood was home. Their family was a quick walk or car ride away. They would have Sunday brunch with extended relatives on a regular basis. He used to work at the factory on the north east side making film, but the company exported the jobs. He managed to work long enough to collect a pension, but for the last ten or so years before he retired, he had to work three low paying jobs to maintain the income level he had before they laid him off. Clarence was a nice man, but Bella was a bit crass.

After so many years working as a cleaner, she was very particular about how things were kept, how clean a room should be, how well kempt a garden should look. Bella would often be around weeding her garden when the kids were playing in the sandbox. One day the kids were as excited and exuberant as ever, running around and throwing a ball around. It managed to get away from them and over the fence into Bella’s garden, damaging a rosebush she prided herself on. Jude was in the kitchen making dinner and didn’t see the woman scolding the children. It was Desiree who came in screaming crying to her mother. Jude heard the whine and sniffles growing as Diz ran the length of the yard through the slap of the back porch screen door into the kitchen to cling on Jude’s leg and bury her face in Jude’s apron. She peeled Desiree away from the sopping wet spot on her jeans and asked what had happened. Peter had just gotten home and had placed his briefcase on the kitchen table when Jude handed the little girl off to him for consoling and stormed out to confront Bella. He watched through the window as the two woman argued over the fence. The twins were wrestling each other over the ownership of the ball.

He didn’t hear the entirety of the conversation. He had to move closer to the screen door of the back porch to catch anything cohesive. What kind of mother lets their kids run wild, I would never let my children terrorize the neighborhood like that, destroying gardens, he heard Bella say. She pointed out the damaged bush to Jude. Look, you crabby old witch, he heard Jude reply. She was on her own there trying to keep an eye on their children and make dinner for him, a husband working twelve hour days. A man she rarely gets to see or able to enjoy his company because of his schedule and the tending to the children. She didn’t know anyone in this city, that all of her family was back in Bison, too far to offer to watch the kids while she cooked dinner every night. And God forbid that someone who has raised children and knows the difficulty might offer her a helping hand in keeping them in line instead of traumatizing them for being children to begin with.

Bella stood there, taken aback. Jude turned around to the twins still fighting each other over the possession of the ball. She called their names and they froze, dropping the ball between them. She told them it was time for dinner and they had to wash up. They ran to the kitchen where Peter was cradling Desiree. His daughter’s arms were around his neck as she sat on his forearm. The twins bolted in, the screen door slapping closed behind them. The little metal latch hook tapped a few times before it stopped. Each of the boys hugged one of his legs on their way to the downstairs half bath to clean the dirt they had collected on their arms wrestling over the ball. Jude was making her way back across the lawn. He could see the tears in her eyes.

That night they talked about how she felt. How she felt alienated, that the neighbors looked at her with furtive derision in sideways glances. She told him how unhappy she was and it would be a long time before she felt better about their new life in Roc City.

He explained this to the circle of people around him. He didn’t tell the group much else. Just that he found it hard living in that big house with only a cat and the occasional visit from his son Rusty, who had been to a few of the sessions with him. Russ was the only child he had that still lived in Roc City. The two would go each month to Mount Hope Cemetery and lay a flower on Jude’s headstone. A man sitting next to him rubbed his shoulder to console him. He was tearing up. He knew now, sitting amongst all these strangers, how alone she must have felt. How terrible it was to find the one you loved absent from your life when you needed them the most.

Roc City Blues excerpt - Cherry Snow

Growing up, he never thought of death or loss. There were no expectations of him, thus he had no expectations of life beyond its constant continuation. Death was something abstract, a historic event that only occurred in a previous time, before he had existed, or a prophecy – fictitious, written in a forgotten language, translated and retranslated into and from various languages over the centuries, an anxiety unfounded and easy to ignore through the distractions of day to day living.

It wasn’t until his maternal grandmother’s funeral that such a monster in the closet as death was to him became a reality. Russell and he had been asked to be pall bearers for her funeral by their Aunt Bella. She had moved in with Grandma Rose after the matriarch had started to suffer from Alzheimer’s in the few years before she died. Each subsequent visit for Dustin and family to B-lo for reunions took on a surreal form. An absence of recognition in the eyes of the old woman who used to smile at the sight of him and his siblings clouded that window to the soul. Tinges of sadness around a smile while children hugged her goodbye after those reunions concluded molted into quizzical lines of confusion about why such strangers were letting their offspring share such affections with her.

He thought about Grandma Rose’s memory loss. How vile a thing must it be to be unsure of the life you’ve lived, of whose life you might have been a part of. But his affection for her was a distant one. Something of a bond not quite formed. It must have been a reciprocal feeling between the two. His family had moved to Roc City from B-Lo well before he could recall any contiguous memories of his own life. He performed affectations for those relatives visited, as the frequency of such visits and their diminutive length left little allowance for deep formulations of familial bonds.

So it was as such when his Grandma Rose had slipped in the shower and broke a hip that Dustin felt only as bad for her as for anyone who might have been the subject of bad news delivered by a friend of a friend having met once or seen around his environs on occasion. A simple sadness, shallow and fleeting, more from the idea than the reality. Having been so old, his grandma had developed pneumonia in the hospital and slipped into a coma. He only noticed those days with any difference to the others in his life in the face and voice of his own mother. She would be on the phone with her sister on a regular basis, discussing the condition of their mother. She was getting worse with each day that passed. His mother began making frequent trips to B-Lo, spending the night there.

Dustin thought of how limited his father’s cooking skills were – macaroni and cheese with the occasional pan fried hotdog slices thrown in for flavor served each night during her absence. He thought of this more than he ever thought of how close to the edge of forever his grandma was.

In the final week, his mother asked if he and his brother wanted to say goodbye. Dustin did not really have an opinion, but seeing Russell’s eagerness, it infused in him the same desire. In her hospital room, Grandma Rose was hooked to a respirator, unconscious and oblivious to all that was happening. Her skin hung off her bones, having been forgetful of meals before the slip and now only being able to ingest food through intravenous tubes connected by needles in her forearms and the backs of her hands. She was covered in bruises from deteriorating circulation. Dustin watched her chest raise and lower with mechanical rhythm, unnatural and haunting. There was a rattle to each breath, as if something might escape, attempts to say some final words of utter import, something profound, but they were pressed beneath so much sleep and anesthetic they could not find their way out. Russell stood at the side of her bed, holding her hand. He said a small speech to her through a veil of tears and phlegmy sobs. Dustin stood closer to the door watching the happenings of the room. The nurses coming in to check her chart, change her IV bags. His mother turned to him, bleary eyed, and gestured for his company at her side. He obliged. Slits of sunlight fell on the old woman’s ailing body through the blinds. They stood their in silence for a long while, his mother combing her fingers through his hair.

Grandma Rose died a few weeks later. There was a wake, a funeral, and a celebration. At the funeral, Dustin, his brother, and a few uncles and cousins wore suits and were pall bearers. Dustin’s and Russell's were ill fitting, their growing bodies in between the stage of child and man. They didn’t quite fill the shoulders as well as their older relatives. Their hair was flat with too much gel, parted and straight save for the ends where the gel lost strength and it curled. They carried the casket from the parlor to the church where a mass was held. Eulogies were said. He looked around and saw all the women crying. A few men dabbed their eyes with the tips of their ties. He felt nothing any different than he had for all those years growing up. And then he looked at his mother. She was holding his father’s hand tight. He could tell how hard by the whiteness of his father’s knuckles, the redness of the fleshy part of his hand, the heel of the palm by the thumb. Her other hand clutched a bouquet of tissues, snot soaked and damp from tears pouring from the corners of her eyes. He watched her face wrench itself into the most pitiful expression he would ever see her wear as someone at the pulpit read something about Grandma Rose as a mother, about her memory loss, and about how much she was loved.

It was that expression that moved something deep within him. A door, a massive boulder at the edge of a reservoir of emotion and tears, a psychic pain he had known no equivalent to had pierced him to the core of his being, having seen the look on his mother’s face. He did not, could not understand it beyond the fact that he never liked to see his mother in pain.

Looking upon his own mother’s lifeless body in the funeral parlor at the wake, her face painted with mortician’s makeup, unnatural and unsettling, listening to Russell read his eulogy, he knew what she felt that day. A true moment of empathy, something rare for him, unable to understand people, he thought about how she would never see what might become of him, no longer there to congratulate or scorn, the same way all the memories of Grandma Rose’s life flaked away from her decaying mind. What are we to those we love but the collection of memories they have of us? How soon we find we disappear from their perspective of the world when their memories disappear from ours.

A Man Apart (part i)

The man leaned against the bar with his elbows as he sat on the stool. The bartender didn’t remember pouring him a drink, but saw he was sipping spirits out of a scotch glass and figured he must have poured it for him. The bar was empty save for a few townies having an early end to their daily shift. The bartender moseyed over to the man, wiping the rings of condensation off the bar where he had served the townies bottled beer from the chill box while he moved. He stopped at the man, noticing the scotch glass was almost empty.

“This is good scotch. You know, I hadn’t touched the stuff for over a year until last night. Had a terrible fight with the wife, went for a drive. Downed a whole bottle,” the man volunteered without prompting.

“Are you sure you should be here?” the bartender asked. He didn’t want to be a pusher, though his livelihood depended on patrons bordering on alcoholism and reinforcing their choice with a tinge of denial.

“I could finish that bottle on that shelf off in less than five minutes and not have the slightest buzz.”

“I think you’re a little old to think you’re superman. I mean, you’re no frat kid, you should know if you drink all that as quick as you say, you’ll probably need an ambulance.”

“I needed help a long time before this.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve never been one to think beyond the scope of my own desire. For some reason, someone saw something in me I couldn’t, or thought they saw something. I never could figure it out. I guess that’s why last night happened.”

There was a stiff silence between the two. The clanking of billiards and dull din of quiet conversation could not push the bartender to ask. He stood there drying a glass, noticing after a second that the man’s was filled three fingers. The man took another sip.

“You know, there’s a theory about the universe,” the man started. “It goes that before man invented the telescope, the planets and stars that we couldn’t see with our naked eye didn’t exist as things – as solid, real things. They were possibilities. Like a reflection on a pond that someone had dropped a stone into, they looked like the reflection on the ripples, that they could be this far in one direction or that, or what have you. I wonder if that theory applies to people. Do we all of a sudden find ourselves at a loss of possible outcomes once we look upon a mirror and recognize that we’re limited in our abilities? The child knowing himself only to know really that he cannot be more than the path chosen? Or is it when someone else looks upon you, seeing something they expected, and then you lose the possibility of being anything else? And when they finally find you, you’re exactly where you were thought to be, all those tendencies so inherent in your being leading to the only outcome that made sense when someone paid attention…”

“ Sorta like how you know Buffalo isn’t gonna make it to the playoffs by midseason,” the bartender offered.

He had heard drunken philosophies before, though this was a bit more poetic. He turned around to put away the glass he had been drying, noticing that he had started to wear a hole in the towel. When he turned back around to say something to the man, something profound and relevant as well as consoling, he found that the man had disappeared, the glass was gone, and no tip was on the bar. He left the back of the bar to see where the man went, though the time it took him to turn around wouldn’t have allowed for the travel of distance it took to go from where the man had been sitting to the exit or the bathroom which were on the side farthest from them. The bartender questioned the townies, but they said they had not seen a man either pass their way, nor had one been sitting at the bar since they had arrived. The bartender went back to tend bar as new patrons came in, shaking off the cold winter snow from their shoulders. He looked through a small window that let in the fading November light. There was a break in the clouds where a column of light shone through as if God were pointing down at something significant.

Write What You Know.

So what do I know? It's all about finding the right words. Finding something to say, knowing how to put it. Why start a blog? Everyone else has one? Why join the herd? Why not?

I want this blog to be about the world as seen not on TV. I'm not sure how to do that, or exactly what that means, but why not give something a maxim of which to adhere, then send it on its way and see what develops.

The way I think I'll utilize this whole intertube phenom will be via reader feedback. Each blog post will be a short story, something simple, a writing exercise of sorts. The comment section can be for discussion, likes and dislikes, and author comment that might help the reader understand the intent (explaining certain choices in diction and structure that might seem out of place or incorrect). I will post the stories with the title "Fiction:____" - the underscored space being the title of the piece. If it is an observation not lending itself to fiction, I will post it as "Non-Sequitor:____", giving a title to bring the editorial some cohesion.

They say to write what you know, but what is writing? This is writing. You know this. I know this. So what can I say, what fable can I imagine might make sense of all these words collected and arranged? Is it entertainment, an expression of one person's ego, or a greater truth?

I read in a preface to a Vonnegut book that he felt that fiction was more true than any journal or newspaper article about an event. I find this true as well, the way that white light is broken into separate colors through a prism. The prismatic effect of fiction on the human condition illuminates those strange intricacies that help define what it is to be human. The need for irony to crack apart an ideology that has false pretenses. The way a romance unfolds in all its tragic beauty to enlighten us on love and loss.

These are the truths of fiction, the facts of writing, that open up a world of possiblilities, and a blog of a thousand entries.

Hope you enjoy.