God blog it! This is blogging embarrassing...

Okay. So I’ve been writing a lot lately but haven’t come up with anything particularly suitable for this blog. I sorta feel like everything on this blog has to “funny”. The “funny” thing about that is the whole reason I started blogging in the first place was to help with my thesis. My adviser suggested I start a blog to make sure I write every day. What this blog has basically become is the resting place for my old “humor” essays, which, don’t get me wrong, is fine. But I sorta feel like the editor of a mass of material I’m not even sure people still want to read. In any case, to try to bring this blog back to its “creative writing roots”, I’m going to post the beginning of a short story I wrote for a fiction workshop. I suppose it’s not really funny unless I tell you the Daniel from the story, the person I refer to in the third person, is actually me! Yeah! Desperation never sounded so fictitious! Go me! Sit on that street corner feeling sorry for yourself! So, yeah, get a laugh at my expense:

This time: He was only pretty sure he’d forgive her. Sitting, hands on the curb, tiny stones gnaw at his palms. He’s dizzy. Cars keep floating by. Headlights cast wilting shadows on the concrete and asphalt, on parked cars and empty buildings. His breath comes. Cloudy gasps evaporating into darkness, into the night. Must be pretty damn cold, he figures. But he hardly notices.

Okay, get this. If you were passing in your car, you’d be like, what is that pretentious little jerk whining about? And it’s understandable why you’d think that. It is. Come on, he’s wearing that argyle sweater vest with those black-rim glasses – the kind you’d expect from the asshole at Starbucks pontificating in contrived “-ism”s and enunciating words like dialectic. So you understand why he’s a Daniel. Maybe (maybe!) you posses an active imagination and see glimmers of a Danny. But he’s no Dan. No way José! Dan would’ve been back in that bar spiking empty shot glasses, pounding his chest, prancing and yelping around like a neglected hound dog. Nope. No chance he’s a Dan.

The door swings open, resonates its slap of oak on brick. Music rushes onto the street like a wild animal. His body, anxiously, twists to watch three husky men, all wearing a variation on the same flannel shirt, stumble with arms tangled over each other’s shoulders. They sway. They chatter. They’re as if a single person. He doesn’t even have the curiosity to listen when they pass.

Turning back to the street, he checks his watch because it’s something to do. Realizes, he could cry. He really could. But, no, he won’t. Of course he won’t because, God, what if she came out and saw him.

Realize, if this were a movie, credits would be rolling by now. Yup, cue that melodramatic pop-culture dirge that’s supposed to leave you transfixed, transformed, transported on the Hollywood emotional roller coaster. Here’s how they want you to feel. They want you to sit there, fingers clenching that plastic beverage holder on your seat as you stare up at those illuminated names rolling into heavenly oblivion, and you’re totally supposed to be like, wow, I mean, wow. But this ain’t no movie. Therefore, we’ll forget the credits, keep the song, and begin. He once thought, and he would tell you his grandfather (1922-2001) would have agreed, that the “Alabama Song” by The Doors held the meaning of life. And, in a lot of ways, it did.

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