I just don't feel like writing anymore.

~L

I'm actually feeling really nice right now.  Chilling to Moby, enjoying my cold sprite, living off the endorphins released during gym...

Thing are really starting to even out for me.  That, among other things, makes me happy.

For once, things are stable.  Stability is nice.

~L
 

Ah, this was one of the few times where I showed off in my Creative Writing class.  Normally, I'd just stay off to the side and mind my own business, only reading aloud when I wanted to debut a new bit of poetry that I was proud of.

We (the class) broke up into groups of four, which, though slightly too large for my taste, worked out reasonably well.  My group consisted of myself, the Vampire Duo, and one of the Duo's girlfriend.  They were nice people.  I liked them.  What I didn't like was the fact that we had to hash together a short story by the next day and have it ready for a presentation.  Fifty minutes later, and all that my group has decided on was the main character's name.  I also didn't care for the restrictions: it had to be one to one and a half pages in length, and we had to incorporate a chinese proverb of the teacher's choice into the writing.  Yes, I hate feeling confined when I write.

Fifty minutes after starting out, as I mentioned, all my group had was a name and the general notion that we were really going to destroy this guy's life (it took us precisely eight seconds from the get-go to agree on that).  As the bell rang, signalling the end of the class, we looked at each other.  Well, they all looked at me.  I was the strongest, darkest writer of the group, so they decided that I should have the honor of playing God in George Myers' life.  I had a reputation of really putting the screws to my characters before their tragic death, so I guess that I would've picked me, too.

That night, I was bent over my keyboard, experimenting with ways to really wreck poor George's life.  Sadly, no death seemed to work.  Suicide by _____?  I'd already done the easy ones.  Death at someone else's hands?  Not as tragic.  This needed to be a one-man show: I only had a page and a half to make the audience love/hate him, and I had to make it count.

Fortunately, inspiration came in the form of Se7en.  SPOILER ALERT.  Brad Pitt's punishment seemed to fit the best- rather than a quick death, a lifetime of guilt and self-destruction.  It felt bloody brilliant.

I went on that night, ruthlessly shoving Georgey Boy through a meat grinder.

Then, *I* had to go through a meat grinder to get the story in presentable shape.

The printer decided to have a catastrophic error that night, so after several hours of poking and prodding, I was able to print.  It would've been over there, except for the fact that the black ink ran out after a paragraph.  Peeved, I tried blue.  It printed so light, it took a keen eye to even realize that there was, in fact, print on the page.  Now that the two major acceptable colors were out of commission, I had to get creative.  Hoping for the best, I selected Red ink, and cranked the printer's dots-per-inch up to max.

Well, it printed.

Let me rephrase:

It printed PINK.  Bright freakin' pink.  A page and a half of a depressing story, made a mockery of by a printer whose ink was on its last legs.  The irony almost killed me.

Unfortunately, dear reader, whomever you may be, I must stop writing here.  All writing and no sleep make Matt a dull boy.  I'll post part two very soon, I promise.

~L

"Tailspin"

George Myers sat on the overpass rail, studying the mass of speeding multi-colored bullets passing under him; a techni-color school of metal fish speeding in one direction, single-mindedly agreed upon. The drivers gave no thought to his presence; he was just a non-person with no bearing on anyone's life in particular, much less their own. He sighed, watching his breath play in the cold air. He took a swig from his bottle; his closest friend as of late.

Humans generally find self-destructive means to cope with insurmountable powerlessness. In this case, alcohol was the quack cure of choice. He had spent the last two years in one hazy drunken stupor after another. In fact, he only seemed to be sober when he first woke up, and the harshness of reality made sure that he raised his blood-alcohol level promptly.

George was in a fiery tailspin and falling fast. He was in need of a scapegoat, someone other than himself to blame. But there were none; his self-deprecating suffering would not and could not be deferred – so he poured the poison down his throat and never gave life a second thought.

When people die, those that survive don't completely make it. There's always something different, something gone. A slight twitch, a sharp look in the eye, a changed expression: even the slightest of things are prone to change. It is invariable; death affects more than the dying – in fact, some could argue that the dead were the ones that got it easy.

George took another swig from his bottle; his breath reeked of Scotch.

It had been a cold winter day, two years back. A particularly cold one for December, even. Christmas had been around the corner. He had had a good life back then; great by some standards. His wife was a beauty, his house immense, his sons respectful. He had lived the sickeningly sweet suburban wet dream, and loved every second of it.

He was going to stay home that day, to decorate. His wife and boys – they were going to buy gifts. Typical, wholesome tradition. They had left, waving him goodbye. They never returned. A patch of ice on the freeway had seen to that; George would later find out that their Sedan had spun out on the ice and flew into a tree.

That was the first day he found solace in the bottom of a bottle.

George Myers turned around, stepping off the overpass railing. He won today's game of mental Russian Roulette; today, he would not become highway spin-art.

He dragged himself down the street, headed for Scott's Tavern. He was on a collision course with the rapidly rising floor, and he was strapped in tight for the ride. If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up right where we were headed the entire time.

Well, here goes nothing.

I find it difficult to write diary-style entries, so I guess it's the masochist in me that's fueling this entry.  Has to be, right?  Four in the morning isn't my finest hour for writing, either.

This is definitely the masochist in me's fault.

If I were in either of my writing classes last year, a few paragraphs would be nothing.  Sadly, I haven't written as much as a paragraph of creative writing since June.  Eesh.

My "Creative" Writing teacher and I hated each other.  Well, at least I hated her, and she kind of did her own thing.  Her final exam was broken into two parts-  For the first, we were given a list of twenty-five words, and had to write a (very) short story that used ten of them.  I wrote a brilliant (so sayeth I) story about a Pistacchio Muffin [what I had smuggled into the class for breakfast] named Maxwell that was consumed by his hunger for some item that I cannot recall.  I intended for it to be a metaphor for heroin addiction, as I was fanatical about Atmosphere's "God's Bathroom Floor" at the time, but I don't think anyone actually understood it.  I think the fact that he was a muffin threw everyone off.  My writing was usually dark, so a blast from the realm of the Random and Silly was out of character for me.

Let me first tell you about my class.

There were twenty-some-odd of us (with so many people sick or skipping, it was hard to keep a solid count).  I would assume that in most writing classes - especially "Creative" writing classes - people there would actually WANT to write.  This wasn't the case at all.  There were less than half a dozen "writers" in the class, and I use that term quite loosely.  Among them, two were heavy on vampires (which was cool- you could always expect some decent action & some great images from these guys), another was a very talented poet (yet her short stories were... tedious), and the others wrote lots and lots of narratives.  Did I mention that they liked narratives?  Don't get me wrong- I like narratives as much as the next guy, but once they get ubiquitous, they lose their charm.  One narrative sounds like the next, and you could swear that you could mouth along.  Through subtle movements and aquisitions, the Vampire Duo and I positioned ourselves nicely in one of the front corners, allowing ourselves a good shot of not being near the teacher, who liked sitting among the class.

The six or so of us were the only people in the class who could write and/or gave a damn.

Now, the second part of the final exam was to write a page/two page narrative [cringe] regarding our experience with the class, how we grew as a writer, and all that other bull that the school system has watered down and shoved down my throat.

Judging from the response of the teacher to my exam, I'm pretty sure I was the only person who wrote my mind.

I was pulled out of the class by a VERY flustered teacher, and for the next fifteen minutes, we had a heated discussion in the halls about how accurate my portrayal of the class was, what I thought was wrong with the class, and how I nearly dreaded going to the class.

Something tells me that my teacher wasn't very happy with me.

Or maybe she was: I aced the exam with a 100.

I think the muffin won my teacher over.

~L