Happy New Year’s. Or new ears, if you’ve received hearing aids or those teeny-tiny globular batteries as a gift. Or as a hint or some’n.
I’m gonna go mash-up, mix-up, random live-stream on you, raging modernist and techie though I am.
I’m going to go off-script here and do something spontaneous and–for me–a bit crazy. As Seal said, we’ll never survive unless we get it a little bit of it, from time to time.
Okay, here’s the idea. Incoherent as it is. Play along as much or little or none as you want.
Let’s create a story together. I know it’s been done on Twitter, but let’s try it here in the comments, if that works for you. (I’ve developed an allergy to eggs, so I haven’t tweeted for quite a while. I should, but I can’t.)
Here’s a story I’ll throw out, probably making liberal use of some beauteous or bizarre turns of phrase and situations from the stories, articles, graphics/memes, music, other media, and poetry I’ve enjoyed in the last couple days. Use these scaffolds as you wish or not, and I’ll write along, too. Shall we build together? Til’ around midnight, EST, or whatever.
What the hey . . . here goes. And, above all, have fun, Pen-ball Wizards.
You’ve got big boots to fill, co-pilot-writers. I know you can do it. 🙂
How to Be a Woman in the Center of the Earth and Which Way to Go from There
Good madness is the kind you find looking (you, looking; it, lurking) under the carotid-red pillow at Grandma’s house. The one she sewed herself of the cheery holiday dear, leaping. (Wounded?) The one she continued on, she told you with a quiver of tears, that her mom never finished before she died.
Well, Grandma, she uses tinsel and a real tree because she’s got no cats. Nope, none of those little curious hair-pillows leaving vomitus that you’ve stepped on before you know it. (Another story for another time: how the black cat piled the dead thing’s organs up in a darkling heap on the sidewalk steps of mottled concrete.) Emergency veterinary clinics, 24-hour joints, cash-laden, sardined-crammed with people who crave the willy-nilly of chaos like catnip craves, well, a cat. It’s that whole one-hand-clapping, tree-falling-in-the-forest-who-hears-it conundrum. If a want is never wanted, does it cease to be? Do you cease to be if you have no wants? Who in the hell carries a loaded, cocked pistol in their purse with young, hence handsy and pilfery, children nearby?
Well, this fiction wasn’t supposed to be about pussies. Or pusses. Or pus or pluses, for that matter. Besides, I’m math-averse. And I despise guns, and boots stomping on historic human faces forever.
Sifting through a purse, I find a vignette I haven’t used before. A spill of light, the shape of a crescent. I’m a bit overwrought with that last bit, so I guess I can edit it to say “a crescent roll,” not the arty crescent or, still yet, the noble star and crescent associated with modern Islam.
And barnacles of bark, green and yellow in tooth and claw, are growing on this vignette. Humming, a veritable beard of bees. By the way, I pronounce vignette to rhyme with cygnet, or young swan. I used to mispronounce many words and was mistook for a Lafayette lass once. Now, nonce.
Dawn was a particular bitch gone–caught–in my mis-gated teeth.
Invalidated is the word of the month, I’m told. Regardless of your gender, sex, or otherwise. Have you ever felt invalidated? Inactive? Ennui’ed? Tired of life? I would say keep it up, but the joke’s been taken already. Probably in a Montgolfier balloon, too.
So, when I found the vignette, I thought, what better way to give it life than to throw it out there to the webs committing us, one to the other. And, so, I created Calineapurnielathea-Su, a fictional character portmanteau.
Change her, rearrange her. Add people to the rooms of her mind, wind them up, burn them down, whatever you can concoct.
Put them in a Pizza Hut and let them go. Have them playing football, but, please, not American football, which seldom uses the foot. Go figure.
You could begin with this (or not):
“Afterwards Cal walked into a fine drinking establishment with five characters. It was secreted in the Oort cloud. Either that, or a cloud on Venus. It was called, simply, The Space Bar. Mostly inhabited by writerly types. That, and Cal’s companions. They were her soul’s doppelgangers (or pentagangers?): Creativity, Nature Girl, Mother Woman (thank you, Kate Chopin), Anxiety, and Self-Worth. Anthropomorphize or animalize them as you see fit.
Now, go!*
*Unfortunately, time being what it is in this universe–namely linear, as far as we know–you will probably want to keep your comment shortish so I can respond/gatekeep and all that good jazz before the clocks strike midnight EST and we all turn into pumpkins. Oh, okay, I’ll settle for a “normal” person, whatever the hell that is. Of course, keep it relatively clean, no racism, homophobia, religion-bashing, over-the-top animal or human cruelty/abuse, misogny, that kind of stuff. In other words, play nice y’all.
Leigh's Wordsmithery 