Short Story

So I had this great idea for a short story the other night.
I wrote it and it was raw but something in it glittered.
So then I revised it and polished it and it started to shine.
I discarded, I condensed, I amplified. I smoothed out rough edges. I ministered to flaws.
The story started to fly, the prose looped the loop, the characters yelled like the living.
I stood back. The tale sparkled with anger, with tenderness, with honesty, with hard-won joy.
With truth.
Dawn broke and I was hungry, I was tired, but I was at peace. All that searching had led to gold.
To hell with everything, with love, with work, with the world outside. Here it was. Here was enough.
Then I deleted it, because the last line was, you know, predictable.

Writing Wrongs

‘Hey, Seb?’
‘Yes, Seb.’
‘So what have you been doing with your time since you’ve been back? Settling back into the flat? Looking for a job? Exploring London?’
‘Writing.’
‘Writing?’
‘Yeah, writing.’
‘Writing what?’
‘A novel.’
‘A novel?’ I frown. ‘Really? What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a lot of things…’
‘Let me guess… Is it, like, a novel about the way-we-live-today? A novel with a hero who asks himself lots of questions, you know, he’s doing OK in life but he’s asking himself the bigger picture questions and that’s when things start to go wrong. Is it about that? And through that, you skewer the hypocrisies and absurdities within modern society, giving thought provoking insights on growing feelings of isolation and loss of control. Am I close? Perhaps you’re using some of the experiences and thoughts you had on your travels although it’s not at all about you. And at the end, the hero finds salvation in doing simple things, being a good person, finding a purpose. Is that what it’s about?’
‘Screw you.’
‘Does it have vampires?’

You’ll Soon Forget Me When I’m Gone

So I was reading an article on friendships, on the typical number of friends people have and on how this number changes when romance enters the fray.
So the article said that the typical number of core friendships was five. This was people that a person saw at least once a week and went to at times of crisis. The next layer out was people a person saw about once a month and would be upset about should something bad happen to.
Apparently, the key to the strength and emotional engagement in a friendship is the frequency of interactions with that person. When a romantic relationship with a new person occurs then there is less time for these interactions so they suffer and possibly end.
So, I reckon, if you don’t want your core friendships to suffer then you need to date someone within that group (gender issues allowing). But what if they all already are in relationships? Furthermore, if they are, then how come the core friendship didn’t suffer in the first place? Unless… unless they secretly pushed you into the outer layer and only actually think about you when you break a toe. That would explain the non returning of calls. Those bastards.

Welcome To Reality

‘So how does it feel to be back in reality?’ I’m often asked since my return.
To be honest, I wasn’t aware that I was out of it. It all felt pretty real to me while I was away, from working in a Costa Rican slum to sitting around a fire in the Canadian wilderness via driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. Is the experience not ‘reality’ because it’s not being stuck in a meeting, or doing the washing up, or dealing with the burdens and humdrum of daily life? But then that’s not everybody’s reality, for some it is, however some people wake up wondering how to spend their billions and others wake up wondering if they will live till nightfall. My reality is everything that I do. So surely the ‘reality’ in the question is not mine, it’s the questioner’s.
‘So how does it feel to be back in reality?’ I’m often asked.
‘I wouldn‘t know,’ I say.
'Christ,' they say, 'pull your head out your sophistic arse, I'm just making conversation.'

Hilarity & Despair

‘So, how does it feel to back?’ I asked me.
‘Well,‘ I answered me, ‘I have a pain in my solar plexus that just won’t quit. It crawls around, slithers in my insides, clambers up into my throat but I can’t scream it out. Jesus, I feel so sick. I’m sweating a lot. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. Sometimes it’s just too hard. I wish I could just lie down and dream it all away, just look into the inside of my lids, into the nothing, into the black. I sit down in front of the laptop and nothing comes out. My hands are permanent fists. I just can’t seem to pull myself out of it, you know, the fire is going out. Damn it all. I wish… I wish… I wish…’
‘Hmm, bit melodramatic don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, you’re right. I feel OK, actually.’
‘So what’s next?’
‘Well, I need to get it back, you know, I need to find it. The wolves are pacing at the door. The sky is turning black, streams of acid rain burn into my skin. Nothing seems to work. I need to snap out of it, to surface from this deep dive, up into the blazing sun, to be warm, to be stronger…’
'So you going to look for another desk job?'

Going Nowhere Fast

I read the following in the paper this morning which made me pause:
'You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.'
Hmm.
Then it made me think that you could replace the word 'traffic' with a lot of things, e.g. 'a queue', 'a relationship', 'a life'...
Hmm.
But maybe not with 'a hole', because then you could possibly blame the council instead of yourself.
Hmm.