Creative Writing

[mainwaring]

damp Volvo which doubled as a greenhouse.

Stearns was annoyed by Amanda's inability to recognise iambic pentameter by ear. Seeing her twiddling her fingers there, every time he read from a work in progress, infuriated him

"My generation", said Amanda....

[oilcanbody]

"nearly destroyed by madness...."

[barton2]

"...starving, hysterical, naked, walking the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...wait, where are my bongo drums?  Damnit!"

"That's no excuse, dear," said Tommy Stearns, as he measured out the remaining minutes of the evening with a coffee spoon.  "Meter should be innate, even if some beatnik free verse is lying heavily upon you like a patient etherized upon a table.  Feel the beat!  Coming off the street!"

Amanda closed her damp Volvo and looked chastened, if not chaste.  "I've got some friends coming over to talk about Michaelangelo.  So we can try again later."

At that moment, a Higgs Boson shot into the apartment and, evidently drunk, deprived the fridge of resting mass.  As massless objects are wont to do, the fridge shot through the ceiling at the speed of light leaving in its wake a rough-cut skylight and an excess of gamma rays, which rudely burned off Amanda's head. 

In a burst of irony, Amanda's legs now drummed on the floor, a perfect iambic pentameter that went on for 40-50 seconds until halted by a lack of fresh oxygen to the pertinent tissues and such.  T.S. shook his head, sadly, not only for the loss of his companion, but realizing that only a few minutes, or hours at best, remained to him before his own tissues melted into radioactive porridge.

"Alas, poor Amanda," he cried to the big ceiling hole (or roof hole, depending on how you looked at it), "your ragged claws shall never more...."

[mainwaring]

tap pentameter after tea at four."

In his last hours Cholmondley sipped some Lapsang Souchong and watched The Boy Who Cried Woolfhardisorthy. It was a strange film with some awkward camera work and an obscure plot centering around Karl Marx's Doctoral Dissertation on Epicurus with probable influences from the work of Thomas Pynchon, specifically 'the ultimate plot that has no name.' It also - given Amanda's sense of humor -ceded to the author's penchant for silly songs.

We come across the first silly song, in the film's opening scene, witnessing two drunken sailors rowing away from the dark silhouette of a ship. Slurping his tea, Eliot hears for the first time, the words of the song as it plays out.

Old Tommy went to sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see see see
The claws he'll never see see see
At the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea

Stearns gulped.

An intra-geometrical time-in-reverse intertwingling ran through his nervous system followed by a delicious anticipation of a slow-building poetic tension.

He paused the film and reached for ...  

 

[barton2]

...an Interociter, poached by his grandfather from the set of "This Island Earth," it's spark junctions now corroded and green with age, it's power pack dripping a viscous brown fluid that reeked of ancient Roman footlockers and schadenfreude.  With a slim hope of reversing entropy and the manifold quantum depredations that the uninvited boson had unleashed, he turned on the ancient device and strained his ears to hear the soft sigh that indicated the klystron was powering up.  Sadly, there was only a faint burble and then a flatulent pop, followed by more fluid leaking from the power pack.  Briefly, the screen showed a few dim and broken images, and then darkened again.

"Damnit," cried Eliot, as his heart broke from a despairing anapest into an even more despairing arrhythmia, "what I really need is a...

[oilcanbody]

....a crumpet toaster that does single-side browning properly!"

[barton2]

"Fuck it," said Eliot, "this thread is dead.  Let us end with the most euphonious phrase in the English language and close....



....the cellar door."

[appaloosabeach]

those of us that live on the west coast do not, we have no cellars, other than storage for spuds and carrots, beets? the wind blows in off the ocean, trees crash, the lights are out, cellar doors are from like, vampire movies, the wizard of oz, I went surfing  the other night on the almost full moon, froze my butt off , didn't see a shark, didn't see a babe, didn't catch a wave.
.

[bosox18d]

How about a FUCK OFF SPAMMER Jersey.

[barton2]

Arabellamous Hickorytreehorne Lollapalooza-Nahasapeemapetalan opened the fresh box of business cards and, as her sharp eyes scanned the top one, began to moan and tear at her lustrous and luxuriant chestnut-blonde hair.  When she had successfully dislodged several hundred follicles from her scalp, she snatched her cellphone and called the printers.  "What is wrong with you people?" she cried.  "How hard is it to spell my fucking name correctly?  Did we or did we not go over this a dozen times?"

A calm voice, a voice with the sort of iron calm that only years working in a call center can develop, spoke in soothing tones of utmost contrition and self-abasing mortification.

"THAT's not the issue," growled Arabellamous.  "Yes, they have the correct phone number.  But how the bloody cornholing hell will they know just WHO they are talking with?  There are at least THREE Lolapalooza-Nahasapeemapetalans, with the missing L, living in Des Moines even as we speak!  And one of them is a known criminal, convicted for carelessly stepping over the velvet rope of the Living Room display in the Frances Willard Home with road tar on her soles.  Frances Willard's oriental was soiled beyond restoration.  To say nothing of her behavior with the guard dog, when she lured it from the gatehouse and, well, let's just say that even Rick Santorum would pale and tremble at the sordid details of that little dalliance."

The calm voice spoke again, the suggestion of a mournfully muted coronet in its intonation.

"WITH A PEN?" gasped Arabellamous.  "You want me to correct 1000 business cards myself?"

Again, a voice as soothing as chamomile and crumpets crept into her ear.

"I know it's just a simple straight line, you Pollyanna-ish trepanned baboon!  I suppose you think I am equipped with....

[oilcanbody]

....tiny ink-filled tendrils that protrude from my hands and arms!"

Arabella hurled her cellphone into the swimming pool and went off to fix herself a toasted crumpet with hummus.  The pool boy, Naral Banyan Kierkegaard, picked up the strainer and fished the phone out of the water, leaving it in the morning sun to dry out.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Des Moines, the lowdown and sleazy side of Des Moines where desperate men and women copulated furtively in dumpsters and injected themselves with the powder from discarded toner cartridges, a lonely man was waking up the sound of....

[mainwaring]

self to a series of alarmed affirmations input to an audio digital teasmade next to his cardboard bed: everyone likes me - heating up of hot water; I am a positive influence on everyone I meet today - hot water boils; people like me - tea bag lifted from random box and placed into cup; every day, in every way, I am getting better and better - boiling water pours into cup; everything is easy now - tea stews and a fellow named 'The Dumpster Dude' appears on an ascending tablet-screen ...    

[oilcanbody]

...while a used toner cartridge dealer arranges deals on his Iphone on the descending escalator.  Uber-predator on the dregs of Des Moines (are they, perhaps, the Moines in a state of regression for their former pioneer robustitude?), he is known on the streets as LeFire, or sometimes, he being the old man of his tight circle of cronies, "Pa LeFire."  Dumpster Dude is one of his street distributors, cracking open the spent cartridges and pouring the toner powder into tiny "dime bags," each containing 5 grams of the potent hallucinogen and mild euphoric.  Not exactly a positive influence on everyone he meets, yet many consider Dumpster Dude an integral part of their social circle, if denizens of dumpsters may indeed have a social circle or at least a small social rhombus.

Pa LeFire turned off his phone and walked into his favorite coffeehouse, Zembla's, for a quiet moment over a demitasse and a perusal of the morning Register.  His serenity was swiftly dismantled by a tall shadow oozing across his table.  He looked up, and saw that Dumpster Dude (aka Charles Botkin) had decided on a face-to-face meeting instead of their usual texting.  This was unprecedented, and LeFire did not conceal his displeasure.  He set down his pastry, which lay on its plate like a...

[barton2]

....battered waxwing, recently slain by insufficiently grimy fenestration, the worst kind of fenestration for an inexperienced avian.

"Well?" said Pa LeFire.

"Looks like we might have some competition on the south side of town," said Dumpster.  "Good stuff.  High-grade crystal toner.  Might be a professional lab processing it."

"Not a local guy, then."  Pa LeFire felt the coffee slosh sourly in his stomach.

 

[mainwaring]

Pa LeFire had given up his addiction after a 20 year battle.

On the street, in the dumpsters, it was generally accepted that there were three ways to go in the battle against toner - 'more addictive than cigarettes': you quit and said 'Yes, I've quit' and embraced a divinity, like AA advised; you said 'No, I haven't quit but haven't had toner for <insert time>' and prayed to some agnostic spiritual adviser for continued deific guidance; or you said 'I don't know if I've quit' and embraced Chaos Theory, knowing any minute, toner and its 'heat' could be thirty seconds away around the next corner.

Pa LeFire had purportedly, discovered a fourth way, rumour having it, the cure was from reading Wittgenstein: 'That which cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence.'