My Short Story

Will start tender and get hard. A blithe and witty tone will be established and light-hearted folly will ensue and you may not even recognize the disturbingly dark and disturbing underbelly of my short story sitting under the story like a belly. I have a hate for myself that I own completely.

The idea for my short story will come from a wryly ironic observation made in passing by a friend at a dungy coffee shop on a Saturday morning or from a warm and disturbing childhood memory or from the short story of a superior short story writer whom I will despise for being more interesting than I am.

The narrative arch of my short story will be disjointed and non-linear. The distant past will rub elbows with the near future while the present will be a closely guarded secret. This will keep things interesting. This will also inform my short story with an ethereally transcendendent ontological existentialism which you will like. I’m not sure I actually exist.

Impossible ideas and life-altering themes will hover over my story like a hovercraft. The full weight of these profound allusions will not hit you until you are mindlessly driving home to your split-level in the suburbs or until many years later while you are sitting alone in the dark corner of a horrifically average strip joint and you need this understanding the most.

My short story will be peppered with metaphors like pepper from a pepper shaker peppering a pepper steak; or metaphors added by a metaphor writer to a metaphorical story about something that is really about something else.

My short story will be meta like this and you’ll hate me for this pretense although you secretly admire my moxie for trying such a gambit even though you don’t realize that I am a coward in other aspects of my life so you won’t know that this fear has ruined my life because it has.

The romantic relationship contemplated in my short story will be tinged with the cosmically unbearable heartache I have endured from a generically tragic love affair and you will wonder how I ever managed to claw myself out of the deepest regions of this proverbial hell-hole in order to stand and deliver such an impossibly soul-searing story of unconscionable loss and redemption or whether I am just bullshitting.

Parts of my short story will pertain to a character very similar to myself and will have a self-deprecating tone so that you will realize that I am not full of myself even though my short story is awesome.

The supporting characters in my short story will have funny personality quirks that will define them. You will find this charming and different. A best friend of the lead character will drive an environmentally-friendly car he has invented that is powered by potato skins, so you’ll know he’s sensitive and caring and probably good for the lead character. The next-door neighbor, an insurance salesman, will have a private room in his cellar dedicated to a museum of stuffed house cats. You will come to understand that no one is normal or what they appear to be. I am obsessed with lawn furniture.

My short story will be defined more by what I leave out than what I leave in. My decision to leave out important details will allow you and your unique emotional core to inhabit this space and live within my short story. You shall find meaning in this void that I could never elucidate with the insufficient tools of the English language or another language. Left out of my short story will be a true-life recollection of when I was thirteen and my dad hit me for inadvertently killing our German Shepard.

My short story will have a confessional tone like this and you will come to understand that through my fictional prose I am cathartically bearing witness to the existence of a deep unbearable pain within me that I am not able to access through a literal testimony. I have trouble controlling my thoughts.

My short story will be rife with haunting symbolism. A perpetually barking dog outside the desolate cabin of an elderly man will symbolize the inescapable, noisy reverberations of his ill-considered, illegitimate past. He will have to kill the dog. This killing of the dog will mean something.

The ending to my short story will not be happy or clichéd although its non-cliched-ness will be sorta cliché. Nothing will be solved or answered with the ending, and there will be a conspicuous lack of resolution or explanation that you will tell your friends you really admire even though you secretly don’t like the fact that there was nothing about the story that you truly understood. I am afraid of ever knowing myself.

The last sentence will be open-ended.

Box of Letters

I found a box of letters this morning
Impassioned missives from two helpless lovers
Held apart by many miles on the road
But held together by each other

They were kinda cute
I think you’d like them

The girl was full of fire and wonder
An open world awaited
The boy finally on his own
He reveled in his new freedom
And life in the big city

They’d count the weeks
And then the days
Until they could at last be together
If only
For a few hopelessly short days

She’d threaten to drive up
In the middle of a lonely night

He’d begin to miss her
As he drove away from her apartment
On a Sunday afternoon

To fill the spaces
In between
They’d write about a future life
A life together
Filled with campfires
And impossible ideas
And unplanned road trips
To nowhere in particular

In another kind of world
We could meet these two

Maybe share some wings
And cold Budweiser
On a lazy Saturday afternoon

And talk about lives that are led
And lives that are followed
And trade sideways glances
As they laughed and touched

There’s a lot we could teach them about
How to be distracted and complacent

And how avoidance is a friend to inertia
And hearts can get hungry
Without proper care and feeding

But maybe also about how loosed bonds
Can be sealed
Through suffering and redemption

And that the burned-in kind of love
That comes with many years
Filled with a thousand moments
Of unspeakable heartache and glorious renewal
Is more vital
In some ways
Than the new, ecstatic kind
Even though you can’t get rid of it
Even when you’d like to

And about perseverance
That may or may not pay off
And whether
There is nobility in trying

Perhaps

… the way I ate my broccoli
Head down
Did not confer
The raucous fires
I would walk through
To feel you.

… the blue light of the television
On my face
Did not illuminate
The borrowed time
I would forgo
To know you.

… the silent distant stare
Did not portend
The lost wars
And hopeless battles
I would wage
To receive you.

Well.

Poetry

David’s currently skating through a rough patch of ice. David’s not very good at skating on the good ice.

Here’s some poetry:


Snow on Branches

Ephemeral, transcendent snow falls softly on crooked tree branches
Said tree branches now have snow on them
I love you, Maggie

Love

The warm and sullen summer breeze blowing gently through your soft auburn hair
Reminds me of the time
We went bowling with your brother-in-law

Soul Food

I would like to curl my shadowy, unknowable self into the dark corners or your soul
I bet it’s warm in there
It’s been cold lately
I’m also hungry for chips for some reason

Dear Son

The weight of the world rests on your insufficient shoulders
You knoweth not
One day you must show me
How to teach myself to live
I’m also looking for the remote
I saw you playing with it

Untitled

The crude folly of the heavens could not divine your unconquerable spirit.
A thousand unseen golden vistas cannot explain your raging beauty.
Words are good for that. Sentences.

It Is What It Is

The soft ivory skin of your shapely back; so kind to the touch.
Your glorious incandescent face; terrifying in its raw beauty.
The smell of your neck, the warm pulse of your veins.
Your uncompromising heart, an unrepentant warrior.
The bob of your colored hair; permutations of glory.
The taste of your skin, all that is you.
No.
It’s your fucking brain I love.

What the F' Have You Done With Your Life?

Rare is the true friend that presents one with the full panoply of one's never-ending disgrace. It is more often that one must unwittingly discover for himself the cosmic inconsequence of one's unfortunate yearnings.

My rude awakening to the monumental insignificance of my artistic journey ocurred a few weeks ago when I checked the "site stats" section of my website. It was a high traffic day (10+ "hits"), so I thought I would review the stats page to get a flavor for the geographic locale of the world's literarti that were culling my treasure trove of articles, essays, rants, parodies, films, etc., contained in the site that represented the self-selected "Best-Of" of my life's artistic body of work.

Was my site being used for advanced degreee research papers at an obscure university in Leningrad?

In addition to the locus of these inquisitive minds, I was also curious about the search terms that led these scholars to tap into my profoundly unique and uniquely profound (yet undiscovered) take on post-modern life.

What exactly were these hungry minds looking for that they at last found when they were fortunate enough to discover my site?

I had to know.

Herewith is a sampling of the actual search terms that led the world's literary cognoscenti to the doorstep of my house of profound wisdom:

"Ashley Mary Kate Olson's Tits"

"porn comics"

"discreet fun in baltimore"

"llama incarceration"

"pictures of naked gay indians boys"

"amish gone wild"

"rubber band erection"

"women hockey players pose nude"

"feminist speeches scum"

"verbal, small penis humiliation classifieds"

"linda lavin's history"

"brandon's baked"

"Dennis Rodman's relationships"

"I've spent on women and booze"

"sexy hardbodies"

"www.fatherandsonsex.com"

"genetic abnormality supermodel"

"hollywood sextacular"

"fourteen year old hooker"

"cost accounting"

"jason osbourne male model granola"

"Where is the nearest dunkin donuts to st. johns"

"chicago albanian mafia"

"asshole obituary"

"booty patrol"

Blog Rules

Based on a palpable groundswell of underwhelming demand, I've decided to create a web log or "blog".

There's something missing in your life. Admit it. And that something is greater knowledge of my thoughts, feelings, and opinions about my life.

But enough about you. Just to make sure we're "on the same page", here's what you can expect if for some reason you are interested in returning to this blog:

What you will not find on this blog:

- Arguments or opinions substantiated by actual facts or even the basic logic of a small child.

- 2+ readers

- A lot of posts and stuff.

- A casually witty deconstruction of The Federalist Papers.

- Health tips.

What you will find on this blog:

- Non sequiters.

- Foul language.

- A surprising tenderness.

- Cock jokes.

- Angry unfiltered diatribes peppered with ecstatic but fleeting moments of joy, understanding, and clarity.

- An unshakable appreciation for humanity.


Fair engough? Godspeed.