Brainstoming
Step One: Brainstorm
Europe Tales
Garmisch Tales
Posted in ideas
Tagged Amsterdam, Austria, brainstorming, Florence, Germany, Munich, Oktoberfest, Paris, short story ideas, Soulfly, writing
part 3
I’m ready for this trip to end.
“Do you think that this is real life and that sobriety is actually when we are on drugs?” I ask Zen. I don’t even think about the fact that he probably can’t feel anything yet.
“Maybe.” He says.
There are headlights pulling up into the driveway. The sound of two car doors slamming in succession. I can only make out the shadow of the bodies walking toward us. They look like spirits returning to haunt the house where they died. I keep this thought to myself. I can feel them walk up the stairs as Zen and I sit in silence for what feels like hours as the two people, both guys walk, step onto the porch and into the party. It’s- all- time-elapse for me, even the sound of the guys’ deep voices.
“What’s up?” Guys’ voices.
It’s only after they walk through the front door that I recognize Philip and his friend, Jeff. They are both jocks at school. They play everything, but football is the main thing. Unlike other places where they may have chances to get sports scholarships, and go on to play pro, and actually have a life in sports or at least have sports lead them to somewhere, these times will probably be the best times of their lives. I’m surprised we even have football. We don’t have anything else. I don’t feel sorry for them though, at least they’ll get a best time, plus, they’re both assholes. While the rest of us writhe like we are in the hell from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, these guys are living their life of glory. Philip is fucking Kara, but he is dating Allison this perfect Christian girlfriend that probably gives him blow jobs, but wont have sex because she is waiting for marriage, so he screws Kara. Kara has sex. I don’t, and I wont not while I still live in this town. Everyone gets pregnant here, and I swear it will not happen to me, and there is no contraception greater than not screwing one of these stupid boys.
“Have you had sex?” I ask Zen after Philip and Jeff are out of earshot. At least, I think they are out of earshot. I’m suddenly paranoid everyone at the party can her me. I look over my shoulder there are no people watching, but the wood grain is swirling like the gentle current of a river.
I can feel Zen staring at me. He is almost scowling. I can tell he is thinking hard about how he wants to answer. I almost say something smartass about his brain hurting but my brain is actually hurting.
“No. Why do you want to?” He decided to tell the truth.
I look at him totally disgusted. “No. Fuck off. I was just asking. God don’t be gross.” I said all of that, but I think that I blushed. My body automatically flushed in a wild heat that I know was intensified by the acid. I’m afraid I might have turned red and he saw. Then again it may have been too dark. I hope it was too dark. Was that a flirt? Was he flirting with me? Is he fucking with me? That’s why drugs are bullshit it let’s your opponent get the upper hand. I need to chill out.
“Shit. This is crazy.” Zen laughs. “I think I am starting to get a body high.” He laughs a bit more then stares at his hands.
I stare at his hands. I stare at my hands. I have nice fingers. What a lovely nail bed I have. Lovely. I think my gran says lovely. I feel myself smile. It feels nice. Zen had said do you want to. I look at him not looking at me. He said do you want to like have sex. Was he being facetious? I felt self-conscious that he was talking about us when he said this is crazy, but I knew he wasn’t he was finally starting to feel the blue sky. Or was he saying that us sitting here is crazy?
I start to speak but it comes out of my mouth really really slowly, “I think… my lungs… are filling up… with ice.”
Zen busts out laughing. “You took a really long time to say that.”
“I know!” I laugh. And we can’t stop laughing.
It may seem strange that I am sitting on this porch frying with this skin that doesn’t even know that he is supposed to be a racist, but it isn’t. We only have each other. We’ve been friends since we were fourteen. Even though I say I hate him, it isn’t true, he doesn’t know it’s true, but Zen is the only kid that would talk to me after I got out of the Magalia girls correctional facility. Everyone else was afraid of me, which was fine, I like all these assholes to be afraid of me, it keeps them from fucking with me, but Zen wouldn’t give up on talking to me. Maybe that is why I get so mad at him when he makes dumb choices when he reaches out to the wrong people the wrong places. I don’t know. What do I know? We are a class of rejects. Zen is a real hippie kid or at least he was. When he first started school he came without any shoes. I guess it was because he never wore shoes at home. My mom had said that his parents should have known better that they should have protected him, but they were into things happening naturally. I could have said the same about her, my mom, she should have protected me but…she left. Things just happened naturally I guess.
Kids called Zen pigpen. They still call him pigpen. Philip and Jeff would have called him pigpen when they walked up the porch, but they probably didn’t because it isn’t their regular type of party. It’s funny how the jocks get all shy when ever they want sex or drugs. It’s true they never get it from their own girlfriends, the sex that is, at least it doesn’t seem like it. You never see any of the cheerleaders at these parties. Girls. Huh, I wonder if they do anything bad or if their all just as perfect as they appear to be. I don’t get why Kara is having sex with that asshole. My mind is wandering. Maybe that is why Zen chose to be a skin head so people would be afraid of him. Wont work, too many rednecks. They think the shaved head is weird. Makes me laugh. I hate it here.
I want to take Zen’s hand because I need the comfort, but he suddenly gets up.
“I’m going to walk into the woods.” He says not looking at me.
“No. There are fairies in there!” I say totally concerned, then I immediately recognize that that sounds crazy. Then I realize that it is okay to sound crazy when you are high, and then I realize that Zen is not even paying attention to me. This is okay. Everything’s okay.
“Oh yeah. I see them. No I’m going.” He starts to walk down the stairs.
“Wait!” I call to him. “You see them?” I almost whisper this. Zen used to play D&D he acts like he didn’t but he did, I remember. He was and elf. This makes me giggle so fucking hard I can barely stand. “Hey! Hey! Do you see them?” I’m collapsing in laughter, but I can’t get the sound out and I sound like a hyena.
“You sound like an animal like one of those laughing dogs.”
“Oh my god!” I can’t believe he could read my mind like that. “I can’t believe you could read my mind like that! This shit is magic.” Even though I’ll never do it again.
“What?” He looks like a man to me, and I’m coming down a little, and I know I’m not going to do anything stupid, but I don’t want to leave his side. And I’m not sure if I’m coming down, once I stand up, but I could be. Maybe.
“Can I come.” I ask. Tilting just a little to the right.
“Yeah hurry, or they’ll leave without us.” He says look out into the woods.
“Who?” I ask.
“The Ones.” He says.
“Okay.” I say.
I want to take his hand, but I don’t I just follow behind him and it is nothing like it was on the roof where the power was on my side.
+++++
There was this moment in the woods when we could hear the music. It was Vacation by the Go-Go’s, and Zen and I started dancing in the middle of the forest. It was at this time that we could hear Kara calling to us from somewhere beyond our safety zone. The fine line we called it. We were not as far into the woods as we thought and Kara found us. We made her dance the song with us. She was telling us the party was over, and we all knew that meant she was going to go to bed with Philip, but we made her dance with us in the middle of the woods to the Go-Go’s. Music coming in between the pines and the three of us dancing like witches under a full moon. Laughing. The ice of the air stripping our flesh to the bones but none of us could feel it, and for that moment we all could forget that we were trapped. At least I could forget.
And that was the end of the memory of my night. I blacked out. Swoosh good-bye brain, you’re useless here in this place.
Gran woke me early in the morning. It doesn’t matter how deeply I am sleeping I can always feel her staring at me. She is looking for her daughter in my sleeping face. I know this because I can feel it.
She was staring at me, but when I opened my eyes she was already walking out my bedroom door. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the wood paneled ceiling of our trailer. I’m not sure how I got home. I’m glad I am home, but the last thing I remembered was dancing in the forest with Zen and Kara. Zen. I have this sickening feeling over Zen. I can’t believe I even thought he was cute. That is enough for me to swear off acid forever. I actually don’t like doing drugs, but I just get so bored sometimes, and also I feel like doing something completely fucked, like something reckless. I don’t know why, but I’m done with acid. I never liked it. The last time I did that shit I swear I saw some guy eating his own fingers like he was a zombie from Night of the Living Dead. I knew it was chicken, but I couldn’t stop seeing him cannibalize his own hand. Not to mention he totally knew I was fucked up and he tried to mess with me all night. At least my last trip ended with the Go-Go’s.
I wonder how I got home.
It doesn’t matter if I was loud or not. My gran doesn’t care. She’s never been able to get over my mother’s death. She waits for her to come home and I think she is slightly disappointed when it is me. I know she loves me, but she loved her daughter more, and when she died something in her broke. Some people think that the children of children who die make it bearable, but for my grandmother I think her connection was to my mother, and I am a reminder of who is missing from this planet. My dad sees me as a reminder of his mistake of sinning. I wish we didn’t share blood. He wishes it too. He told me. Several times. I’d bleed it all out of me if I could.
I can hear gran moving around in the bathroom. It sounds lonely. I feel like I understand her because I broke too.
My gran is a very young grandma. She must have freaked out when my mother told her she was pregnant. Gran came to this town when she was seventeen. She was moving away from her abusive mother and was on her way to Seattle. She had heard her father was living up in the silver city somewhere and she wanted to meet him and start a new life, but she got lost and found herself in the middle of the Northern California pines surrounded by a bunch of ignorants. Apparently one of the ignorants was attractive because she had sex with him and wouldn’t you know it she got pregnant and here it is the late 50′s and she’s seventeen and she’s pregnant and far away from anywhere that can give her much help so she marries the guy and moves in with his family. He’s okay. He’s a mechanic like his father and his grandfather, but he likes other women, and well gran doesn’t care because she has this baby girl that she calls her little angel and her only reason for being and she tell’s her angel to fly away and become whatever she wants because gran only wants the best for her, but little angel gets pregnant at fourteen, and who get’s pregnant at fourteen? Especially in the seventies? It may have been the biggest scandal to hit this little town ever. Although I’m thinking at one time here that fourteen may have been a normal age to get married, but now and in the seventies you did not have premarital sex. hell this town is so evangelical I’m surprised kids have sex here at all. But mom did and at fifteen she had me, and that made my gran a grandma at thirty-one. Crazy. Thirty one seemed way old to me, but now my gran is not even fifty when all my friend’s grandparents are in their sixties. My gran lost her only child when she was only 44.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged book, fiction, NaNoWriMo, novel, word count, writer, writing
(I really need to come up with a better title but my word count for this round is 1176. I still don’t know where I am going with this, except for 50,000 words)
There are these few minutes before the acid really kicks in when I start to think that maybe this shit isn’t working and Bobo totally ripped me off. Which is funny since I didn’t pay for anything. Bobo wanted to split his tab because he wanted to be high but not too fucked up that he wouldn’t make any money. He’s like a complete and total acid head. I had heard once that he had taken twenty hits of acid last summer. He went out to the desert on a trip with his older brother and they did acid because they wanted to be like Jim Morrison and be incredible poets. I think it may have permanently fucked him up because he’s never been the same. My mom, before she died, had told me that she thought something was seriously wrong with Bobo. She had said that his head wasn’t on right, like a screw was loose. She thought maybe it was his parents, but that she could sense that something was going to go wrong with him. I think she may have been trying to give me some kind of warning. Not that he is a bad kid, but she was right about the parents. There are a lot of fucked up parents in this town. Most likely we all will grow up to be fucked up too there isn’t much hope. Oh but who cares. I feel sick now.
The world is literally swirling around me and I totally just remembered that I was supposed to finish reading Black boy for Mr. Basiles’ class due on Monday. I’m hoping there isn’t a quiz or anything. I bumped into something or someone I’m not to sure a lamp or something or maybe a trench coat. I can’t tell and suddenly everything is completely loud. Outside. That’s all I can think is outside.
Kara is in my face. She wants to know where the tv came from what’s wrong with me and did she want to know about the assignment?
“What?” Kara “Are you fucked up? God damn it.”
And then she’s gone and I just want to be outside.
There is this oppression that is filling like a glass of milk and squashing me drowning me and I know if I can just get outside into the air into the nature out of all of this music. Why? Why can’t any of these people have any taste in music? Why do I have to live in this backward po-dunk town? I know. I just know there was supposed to be more for me. I talk like I am already dead. i wish I were dead.
“I don’t know why I do this?”
“Do what?”
I said that out loud? Or did I imagine a voice. Zen is standing to the right of me. I feel a cool burst of air on my face it is like someone is rubbing a melting ice cube over my face. I check Zen’s hands to make certain he isn’t touching me. He isn’t he is staring off into the woods and smoking a cigarette. Even in his stupid flight jacket and his lame shaved head he looks cute. He actually is cute. I never noticed before, and I suddenly want to kiss him. No, I tell myself, this is totally the drugs talking. But he is cute. He has the most beautiful jaw line I have ever seen. He is about four months older than me but for some reason he looks like a grown man versus a seventeen year old boy. Oh, no, I know the reason. It’s the drugs.
Bobo gave me a hit. It’s called Blue Sky and it must be fucking mad because he’s so high he gave me a hit. Are you feeling it?”
“Yeah.” Is all I can manage to get out of my mouth and I feel a slight jerk in my neck then a massive tension all over my body and I feel like I am seizing. In fact I feel like I am contorting into the shape of Quasimodo, but I don’t want Zen to look at me. I think I’m ugly. I’ve never cared if Zen thought I was cute and now I’m completely self conscious. I’m seeing him transform into an angel and I’m putrid. I hate this shit and I vow that this is the last time I ever do it. I said that before I know, but this time I mean it, and I do.
I step back against the wall of the house and slide down till my butt is on the grey blue planks of the porch.
“Man.” I can hear the sound of Zen inhaling. I can hear the sound of him exhaling. I watch the smoke twist like a ballerina ghost and the float off in to the forest of fairies. I know there are fairies because I can see them in the forest and they are calling me I can hear them whispering my dreadful name. I want to press my hands to my ears to keep their voices out but I don’t want Zen to see me I don’t want anyone to see my hump.
“What are you doing?” Zen is looking at me.
“Stop looking at my hump.” I say.
“What?” He turns to look at me.
“Your boots are too fucking loud and if you even begin to talk to me in that stupid ass accent I’m going to slit my wrist.” I say trying really hard to be cool.
“Mel. I’m not even moving so you can’t hear my boots, and, stop being such a bitch to me. Are you trippin balls or what?”
“Yeah. Now shut up.” I pause a moment and look into the waving fairy trees. “Please.” I feel myself whisper.
Zen is suddenly sitting beside me.
“Did you levitate and land here?” I ask him. I know this is crazy but I swear I didn’t see or hear him walk.
“No.”
“My God you did!” I say.
“No I didn’t! I walked over here.” He starts to laugh. ” Man, this stuff is going to be good.”
“Zen?” I feel this involuntary whine and flirt in my voice and I remind myself that I am going to be mean to him tomorrow. Especially mean so that he can’t tell that I am finding him painfully attractive at this very moment.
He looks at me and I swear that he is looking at my mouth and I think that according to television this is when we would kiss, but instead I say, “What makes you think you are a stupid skin head that’s the stupidest things ever.”
I can feel him sigh heavily. He pulls his long legs up close toward his body and drapes his lengthy arms over his knees as he drops his head between his knees.
“Stop it Mel. I feel like shit tonight okay, and fucking Kara is going to kill me once she finds out about the tv-”
“She already knows.”
(No title yet, and no plot yet, not too certain what the story is but I’m 1,000 words in and 49,000 to go)
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From the top of the roof I could see the lights of the city. It seemed so far away, but I knew that once one of us had a car it was thirty minutes to freedom. The lights flickered like candles on a cake. I could almost smell the chocolate frosting melting over the rounded sides of the dark bunt cake. Everything turned to food for me. Every thought. I didn’t eat much, but for some reason food was the best metaphor. Maybe I’m stupid. I don’t care if I am though. All I care about is getting into the lights of that city and far away from this place.
The shattering of glass and plastic and Zen’s obnoxious yelling pulled me from my thoughts, not that they were all that deep, but for a moment while I was thinking of cake like the kind that my mom made me for my thirteenth birthday before she had to go and die, I had transported myself from this place. I had physically or trans-physically lifted myself from this house and floated over the chocolate frosted city, and soared between the bright thin candles with the candy cane stripes. That’s where I was right before Zen threw the television set off the roof of Kara’s house. The sound was like a car crash slamming my head right through a fucking windshield, only it wasn’t glass, it was plexiglass and instead of dying I bounced back to this shingled rooftop where an idiot boy howled like a rooster at a moon hidden behind the clouds. Nothing like a stupid skinhead named Zen to ruin a perfectly good trip.
I took a drag on my clove and coughed a choked laugh. I had forgotten I was trippin’ no wonder I could smell the chocolate frosting like it was right under my nose.
“Oi’ wot tha’ fuck ya doin?” Zen snorted.
Zen spoke with a terrible cockney accent like he was British, but he wasn’t, he was from Northern California. He had just watched a movie about skins in England. He machoed around making up footballer songs and talking about his working class roots. He wasn’t working class, his parents were hippies. Super pacifist, communal living and loving hippies who made the mistake of not having an abortion and then naming the monster child Zen, ensuring that they were going to have a racist skinhead for a son. Everyone knows children rebel against their parents. Adults should know better than to live an extreme life; if you’re hippie or conservative, orthodox christian or satan worshipping jew you know you’re going to get the complete opposite. If you’re going to have kids you should be middle ground people. Adults never learn anything. I don’t think anyone should be allowed to reproduce until all the homeless kids and unwanted kids get adopted, only then do I think adults earn the right to reproduce.
I was completely ignoring Zen who I could feel pounding toward me in steel-toed black boots with his fucking stupid red laces. I took a final drag on my clove. Stub the end till it was ground into black soot and tossed it to the ground. It was too dark for me to see where it fell. A satanic jew? Where did I come up with that one?
“Oi, I’m talkin’ to yu.”
“Shut the fuck up hippie.” I said standing up. I walked toward the edge of the roof. “If you come any closer I’m going to jump.”
“Wot? Fuckin’ do it then.”
“I will and I just want you to know it’s because I’d rather die then share the same air as you.” I said this with a cool even tone. I wasn’t actually afraid of him. I was just an asshole like he was only I was a different kind of asshole. All my friends were assholes. If we could actually call each other friends.
“Why’d ya have to always be such a bitch?” He shoved his fists deep into the pockets of his green flight jacket.
“Why do you have to be such a meat headed idiot?” I sat at the edge of the roof and inched my legs down toward the balcony that lead to the master bedroom where Kara’s parents slept whenever they were actually in town. “You are not from England you stupid dick-head.” I turned to look at his body covered in a dark shadow. I couldn’t make out his face but I knew the light from the master bedroom was lighting my face. “By next summer you’ll be listening to the Grateful Dead.” I jumped to the balcony just in time to hear Zen call me a bitch. It meant nothing. If I had any feelings at all maybe it would have bothered me but my feelings crawled into the casket with my mother and they’ve decided to stay there buried 6 feet beneath the ground to wait for me to join them.
“Who the fuck threw my parents tv off the fucking roof?” Kara was in the front yard screaming up toward the roof of her house. “You fucking asshole!”
See, assholes. All of us.
I wiped my feet on the rug before opening the sliding glass door. The room smelled like cranberries and sweet strawberries from the cone-shaped
incense that Kara’s mother liked to burn. I heard the sound of Zen’s heavy boots hit the wooden balcony as I walked out of the bedroom into the blare of X’s Wild Thing. The party was loud. Kids everywhere drinking and acting stupid. Everyone was stupid. I wanted to get out of this mountain town and see a place with some culture were kids actually wanted to do things. We had nothing to do. All of us so stupid, almost as stupid as Zen. All trying to be some kind of independent scene that we only knew about from movies and late night television, like Zen who wasn’t really a skinhead, he only dressed like one because he thought it was punk. What a dipshit. I wanted to be around people who at least knew they were emanating a racist organization. I decided right then and there I was going to introduce Zen to Quadrophenia and Joy Division, better he be depressed and suicidal than racist. Oh that thing about the abortion… I only half meant it, but I’m serious about not reproducing till all the lonely children are adopted.
Zen shoved the back of my shoulder.
“Jesus Mel, you can be a bitch.”
“What happened to your accent?”
“I lose it whenever I get my feelings hurt.”
See, not a real skinhead. “Zen, we are watching movies at my house tomorrow and then we are going thrift store shopping.”
“Oi. I like my shite.”
I couldn’t help but sigh. “Dude, you’re totally fucking with my high. These movies will let you keep the accent, but you need some style, really this-” I waved my hand across his body in that I have absolutely no words to describe this mess, sort of way. “-this is sexless.”
“Sexless?”
“Meaning you’re never gonna get any.”
“Oh.”
And it was just that easy.
We walked down the stairs toward the heart of the party.
“So Mel…what are you trippin’ on do you have any left can I have some?”
“Acid stupid. That’s what people trip on. Half a tab of acid, and no I don’t have any. I got it from Bobo and no he wont give you any for free because he never gives anything away for free especially his drugs.”
“Hump.” Zen made a snorting noise with his nose. “We’ll see. I got my ways.” Zen smiled at me like we had some sort of secret message floating between us. I looked at him like I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I didn’t.
“No you don’t.”
“Whatever.” Zen clumped his heavy black boots with the red shoelaces through the crowd of kids clustered into groups of friends gripping bottles of beers and wine coolers. If anyone was holding onto some hard liquor you knew they broke into Kara’s parent’s liquor cabinet but she was to busy freaking out on the front lawn over the television set.
Oh and all that stuff I had said earlier about the city being only 30 minutes away and that I could see the lights were all bullshit. The city is actually 3 hours away and the lights were probably from houses in the hills lit up by televisions and porch lights. But I wish it was that close. A night on the roof with some acid brings it close at least for a few hours. Oh and the acid part about having to pay for it that’s a lie too I got that shit for free.
It has been awhile since I have touched any of my short stories or worked on anything related to this blog.
I recently pulled out some old work, Gunter McWilliams and Ishi two short stories that I had felt had reached completion and both of which have been rejected. I didn’t send them out to too many places so I’m not heart broken.
I had my friend check them out. She is a great reader and had some interesting feedback.
Gunther is science fiction and was a timed writing for the Short Story writing contest. I came in fifth place which I think is pretty good, but the pages were limited. Now that I have no page limit, my roommate has suggested that I expand on the story. She brought up something I hadn’t noticed, and that was that the character is a bit lecherous, and pathetic, and that I should explore that part of his development more. Of course, I wouldn’ say those traits are actually developments.
The second story Ishi is based in truth, but I have desperately tried to make it a fiction piece. She said it was too broken up that the vignettes worked in the sci fi but not Ishi. I have to tell the truth with this story, as uncomfortable as it is to tell.
I probably wont touch them until my novel’s final draft (I think final) is completed. I have 121 more pages to go.
My Antheneum is coming to an end and what I have learned through this experience is that I write a lot more than I give myself credit. I had no idea that I had managed to write as much as I do, only I want to write more.
When I first began revising my novel, I struggled a lot with the opening page. I wanted something that would keep the reader reading. What was my voice? I was still working on finding the main character. I had already written the book from beginning middle to end, but I wasn’t confident with the voice of the main character and the narrator. I had several beginnings that I felt were strong or compelling, but in the end I went with what was the original instinctual voice. What is interesting in the process of trying to find the voice or trying to create that strong beginning is that you may end up writing the beginning of another story. I’ve pasted below one of my beginnings, which in a way is an expository character sketch, that I decided to scrap as I didn’t feel that it would serve the entire book, but as a potential other story, short or long who knows. Sometimes it is hard to let go of something that you really like, but in the end for the sake of where the book wanted to go, I had to leave Karley to be saved for another day. It is beginning to look a little poemish to me.
The dream is always the same. Steel blue water, cold, silent, like a grave, and it was a grave. It had woke me, as it does, at the point when I see her; bloated and wedged between two erratic boulders, ancient, tired rocks, moved by glaciers, drowned by mountains’ rivers, and left to press, and squeeze her like rollers in an wringer washing tube. Always the same bits of her flesh peeling away like dying salmon, clouded lidless eyes, and her name whispered, faint: Karley.
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I write. I write every day. Still I am not writing enough, not the right writing. I’m journaling every day which certainly has its merits, in fact I would never have written my novel Zizkov if it wasn’t for my daily journaling.
I started a new blog post, that I am only doing for one year. It is about journaling everyday for a year. I decided to do it because I was curious if I could and because one day I wondered; if this was my last year of life what would I do with it, then that translated into, what do I do every day. Sometimes the days just rush and blur.
But, it’s still not enough. I need to be doing more creative writing. Exercising my brain. I’ve decided that at least one day a week I have to write a new flash fiction or timed writing piece or a writing exercise. Once a week. That isn’t that much. I wont have time to go back and flesh anything out until I complete my novel, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the practice.
The more I swing the more times I will hit and eventually I will know the exact speed and curve of the ball.
