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nine to the head.
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Idiots, Imbeciles, & Morons

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Other kinds of love existed, and then there was this kind.

Sat|11.23

Friday two boys walking ahead of me were punching each other whenever they saw a white car, I don't know why.

"Ouch!" the younger one said. "That one was silver!"

"Silver counts as white."

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yup."

The younger one glared at him, but had no response. I couldn't really think of one either. Not that I was involved. But still, what do you say to that, that wouldn't get shot down? Since it makes no sense in the first place?

I started writing a handful of novels when I was younger. I wish I could find them. I began writing the first one in fifth grade. There was a convoluted plot about a small ceramic horse filled with heroin that two kids find at the playground and bring home as a new toy, unaware of the other horse hidden inside (Get it?? I don't think that was intentional, though), and the bad bad people who try to get it back from them. I never got further than the third chapter, where I'd finally managed to get them to the playground. The horse was never found. Still to be written.

Another was about three orphaned sisters, living by their wits in the woods, who stumble upon three orphaned brothers, and the wacky hijinks and inevitable romances and hardships that ensue. The youngest girl was going to drown in the river, I knew that much, but I never got past them all meeting. The boys were all one year older than each girl, something my mother pronounced as "fortunate" after reading it. Now I recognize the sarcasm, but then I'm pretty sure I said something like, "It's not luck, Ma! I wrote it that way." I was a rude child.

The last one I started was in junior high, before I succumbed to my life of illicit drugs and shockingly low grades/high hair. It was an account of my best friend and me buying pot from a boy in my homeroom who I had a crush on in real life, and getting caught, and then being sent away by our mothers, because our fathers would just be so angry and it would be better if we went away for a couple of weeks. We weren't even sent to stay with relatives, we were on our own, along with this boy from homeroom who was able to come and go from his home as he pleased, and I'm sure wacky hijinks and scary hobos and romantic trysts in abandoned buildings would've occurred if I'd written the damn thing. The barely-disguised characters and locations (I changed one letter in each person's name, to protect the innocent) makes me hope that my parents never found that one. Although it's probably in a drawer somewhere in my old room.

But my favorite is one that was set in a mapped-out imaginary town. I spent much more time creating the place than writing the book. There were a lot of churches and bars, and railroad tracks separated the town from the village, which were both called the same name. Whenever the protagonist said where she were from, the person she was speaking to would narrow his or her eyes suspiciously and say, "Town or village?"

I remember two lines of dialogue clearly, and that's because of how they made my sister crack up while she was reading the story. "What?" I'd said, eager to know what was funny. She pointed at the two lines, which were very serious, and I was bewildered. "Why is that funny?" I asked, but she couldn't really say, and every time she tried, she would begin to laugh again. "I don't know," she finally said. "I'm sorry."

In the scene, the two main male characters were talking about the protagonist while sitting on a bench at a basketball court. One tied his sneakers, and the other thought deeply while watching him, then shared an observation.

"Man, you have fallen hard."

"Damn straight," replied sneaker-tying boy.

This just killed my sister.

At one point I stopped working on it so that I could begin transcribing from the scrawled writing. I spent hours on my portable typewriter getting the correct number of spaces in between each word so that the right margin would align, not realizing that there were people called "typesetters" who would do that for you once your work of art was accepted for publication.

That time spent unnecessarily formatting each page was some serious foreshadowing of life to come, looking back. Ah well, what can you do. Other than something.