An Excerpt and a Note

Here, to prove that I have been writing a very little bit, are an Excerpt from the story and a Note I wrote myself to include somewhere in the story:

Excerpt:

"leaving my neighbors to reach their shuddering climaxes without an audience"

Note:

"read the Grapes of Wrath instead of this story"

Also, now it's time for a plot twist from an unrelated story that hasn't been told, or even conceived of, at the present moment:

"Turns out the step-father had it in the closet, and had been lying about accidentally killing the dog to his step-son, whom he never really loved."

And with that, I leave you.

I have started to write a story

A break from the hilarious absurdity in very short, widely-spaced bursts you've come to expect from this blog.

Jess and I had a brief conversation about religion, etc., on the ride home from work yesterday, which got me thinking about what the hell it is that I even believe. Then later she showed me a blog post about writing, with the advice of letting your guard down and just fucking writing something without too much worry of how it will be received by anyone who happens to read it.

To that end, I have started to write a short story. At the moment, I have no idea what the particulars of the story are, but that I want it to be about how damn interesting people of any and every stripe are, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary, from our potential for unquestioning good acts to our prediliction for unspeakable evil. A deeper theme will probably be that, despite all the horrid and unspeakable things we do every day, I somehow maintain great hope for humanity that cuts through all my post-modern cynicism. This hope, I'm starting to think, is as close to religious as I can come these days. People are evil twisted manipulative assholes, and isn't that great?

Anyway, now it seems I'm firing on a lot of different cylinders. Of course, music remains the "side" pursuit that excites me the most. I've also started to dabble a bit in trying to write some comedy with a particular interest in things that are filmed, and now this story. Let's see if I can't keep it all in the air somehow.

Sigh....leap year

Wow, so no one really told me the reality of leap year. As you can tell, I was really excited about the prospect of, man, 24 more hours in my year! Freebee! But I really had no idea what I was getting into.

I had so many plans. I was going to have a party, for one. No one showed up. It was just me, a small keg of homebrewed beer that I named "Leapy", and a huge basket full of fried frogs legs ("leap" - get it?) Pretty disappointing, to say the least.

I was also going to carouse the streets, giving everyone what I assumed was the widespread "Leap Year Greeting." But whenever I approached someone by jumping in front of them and yelling "Hell of a day, my main man!", they seemed at best annoyed and at worse outraged. I expected the typical return greeting ("And a howdy leapy hoe to you!") but all I got were a range of sour expressions. After the fortieth or fiftieth person I greeted in such a jubilant manner, I returned home, dejected and utterly defeated.

So here is my lesson to you. Leap Year is a false holiday, maybe because it is the only practical holiday that exists. Every few years we need an extra day to knock our calendar back in order, and Leap Year serves no other purpose than make sure that our cycles stay intact. If it was just a made up holiday, like New Year's or Valentine's Day, people would probably want to celebrate it a lot more.

I guess I just expected too much out of people.

This post, and the character who wrote it, suck.