Badly Drawn Boy

I’ve had more appointments with doctors this year than I’ve ever had in my life, and still there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t want to believe I’m a hypochondri-addict but maybe it’s just a truth I can’t confess to. After all, I’m a slave to compulsion and my mind is creative and stubborn enough. I’ve got all this strength in me, all this talent and ambition and device and circumstance, and yet my most developed ability is making excuses. It’s not improbable that this illness has been imagined so well that it’s taken over my health only as an excuse why I haven’t done more with my life. My body isn’t sick; I’m sick of myself.

Ripples

I wish my arms were longer, so I could reach across this gap. Instead, I'm waiting in fragments for life to happen to me. Everything nearer the ocean seems so ladylike. I want to feel her soft breath on my face. I want to hear her heartbeat pulsing in waves. I want to wade in something magnificent and refreshing, and until the day that I can, the only thing that comforts me is to dream and wish and -

Want.

Time

Time is not on your side, but that doesn't mean it's your enemy. It's not holding you back because time is not what you think it is. We've created a system of measuring it, breaking it down into seconds, hours, centuries. This is only our interpretation. Time continues without us, unaffected, and we are no more its master than we are its slave. We could one day change our units of measurement, give ourselves more time, but that wouldn't make us any less afraid of running out.

Fading Into The Sunset

"I don't want to repeat myself," the old cowboy said, "but this place ain't big enough for both of us. 'Fraid one of us has gotta go."

He turned his head and spat at the ground, leaving a dark brown stain of whiskey and chewed-up cigars. This was how he knew life, through drink and smoke. He pulled his belt buckle up and walked towards me, each spur of his boots digging into the dirt before the toe. I could feel peril in the air around me, as obvious as the unbearable midday sun on my face. I couldn’t guess how he was going to kill me.

“Listen,” I plead with him, “take my horse. She’s a good horse, fast.”

“Don’t need no horse.”

“Okay, then take my pistol. Shoots straight, never jams.”

“Don’t need no pistol.”

He kept coming at me, slowly, his shadow creeping up my legs, my chest. Soon he was blocking out the sun completely. It was cold in his shadow and I started shaking. I closed my eyes, pictured him taller, meaner, and dressed darker than he was. When the sun was once again warming me, I opened my eyes carefully. He had walked right past me and was already well off into the distance. By the time tonight when the sun’s sitting gently on the horizon, he should be right in front of it, his body a perfect silhouette of the memory of yesterday.

Dating Your Writing

There are some things that I just don't do when I write. Things that I consider to be literary faults. One of them is references.

I avoid pop culture references as much as possible. When I read a story that refers to, say, a Beatle, the thing that immediately jumps out at me is how distracted the reader is going to be if they don't know what the person looks like. In that short story competition I entered back in February, I found that a lot of those writers did exactly this. Personally, I think this is lazy. Sure, I can picture what someone looks like if I'm told he looks like a young George Harrison, but in 20-30 years that reference is entirely expired. That's how easy it is to date your writing and confine it to a specific lifespan.

Maybe some day I'll explain why I avoid describing distances.

The Pitfalls of Recollection

Being a creative individual is not always beneficial. My mind whirls at such high speeds when I’m left to my own invention that worst-case scenarios start accumulating complexity until it’s so outrageous that it becomes likely. On occasion, reality takes the same form as my paranoia, and further delusion becomes believable. These delusions are not always negative because ego affects them with regularity. Sometimes I think I’m an amazing writer with incredibly original ideas; sometimes I think they’re so good that I must have taken them from someone else, from something that I remember from long ago. Memory, then, becomes less of an attribute and more of an obstacle. It’s a dangerous thing to remember.

From Majestics

This is a fun short story I wrote to get my mind off a larger project I was working on. It is five minutes long, nearly exactly, and in mp3 format. Enjoy!

From Majestics

The Wanderer

In the very last days, I will be able to look back at my life and address it with as much honesty as I do now. Part of that honesty will be to realize that I don't understand why I did some things, why I said some things, or why I wandered around helpless and lost for so many years. All I want is to find something somewhere. And I don't really care what form that something takes, so long as it makes me happy until those last days. Until then... I just wander, and when I stop, I'll be there.