|
|
|
|
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/23/2009 9:35:55 PM | I was born in Aurora, Colorado. What it's like here is like a place where I'm just marking time.
Not my kind of place. I have put a fair bit of time in here, all told. New York. That's my kind of place. Lived in Brooklyn when I was a child. LA. Vegas. Lived there.
A woman approached me recently. We talked a little. She sent a picture. She asked me if I was a happy person. DON'T YOU EVER, EVER, ASK ME THAT! What am I? An appendage, a fvcking accessory? Am I obliged to be happy? I don't even care if I'm happy. What has happy got to do with living?
Happiness wasn't even a concept three hundred years ago.
Here is another one: "What do you do for fun?" Well, aside from beating off, not much.
Sorry for the rant. I wonder why these women don't "get" me? I am getting a lot of approaches lately, mostly from a distance.
I feel like I'm an open book. Are they hypnotized? You don't get me and the comfy stuff too. It doesn't work that way.
I told this "happy" lady that it don't mean nothing till she gets around me and sees how it feels. That's all it is. How do you feel around me? None of that compatibility stuff. Life ain't like that. At least not in my experience. But what do I know?
Okay! That's enough. I spewed all over you. Sorry. Jesse | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 4:34:08 AM | Jesse, I don't think being happy makes you an accessory. Take it easy, some people just don't really know exactly what to say when they approach a person for the first time. I suspect your response answered her question. Don't be so prickly, mister. Relax, have one on me ...
I've been reading your stuff, some of it is a little dark, you have to admit. You strike me as the type of guy that is fairly volatile. I think approaching you would be a little bit like noodling ... like sticking your hand in a dark hole and wondering if you're going to get bitten, or going to get lucky. (grin) | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 8:20:10 AM | Thanks Cindi. All this stuff is old material. My outlook and my life are correspondingly brighter these days.
I want to write some fresh stories soon. Just the same, many will be coming out of the time I spent in Vegas. Nine years. Yes there is a darkness to my writing.
There is a profound and sublime darkness to Las Vegas, hidden under the florescent sun.
A town built on dead, murdered bodies. The darkness is there to be documented and some of the darkest times of my life were the traverse of my journey though casino life and drugs, alcohol and prostitution.
I got what I was looking for. In spades. I passed through the eye of the needle and found God on the other side.
And you know I'm not some religious nut. I'm too down to earth for that.
Yes, I'm rather intense. But I used to be worse. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 9:13:34 AM | | Well, it'll be interesting to see some of your lighter work. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 3:45:34 PM | Come to think of it, I don't do any lighter work. Unless it's an accident. So don't hold your breath.
Any writer worth their salt writes to please themselves. NOBODY else. Covert insults not withstanding.
There is always this option. If my stories disturb or annoy...DON'T READ THEM!
I used to comply with requests from ladies to "write me something funny..."
Because clearly I can be very funny. But then I figured what is the percentage in being entertainment for a woman living in San Diego, for instance, when I'm living in Vancouver.
So I don't send individual women stories anymore. I just dump them here and soon not even this venue because it is convenient and nothing more.
Thanks for your input. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 4:40:24 PM | | Hey Pro, bring more on vegas please, feed the bored....do you know anything about the "G" manifesto, you have a similar writing style.... | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 5:18:09 PM | Cindi, you are an Allie. So , at the risk of offending, here is some more. I can't leave this alone.
The most lucid of the Holocaust chroniclers, Primo Levi, my hero, merely recorded what he saw. He bore witness. Without drama and a sense of detachment that lent a remarkable power and impact to his narratives.
Did we say " Primo! Can't you lighten it up a little? What about the funny side of organized, mass extermination on an unimaginable level?"
And I am writing about the most mundane of human failings and venality. Ham and eggs. The daily fare.
You can scarcely call it evil. It is just sordid and mean. If you look closely enough however, you will see the fertile ground for the extremes of the human condition.
I can't always offer yuks, but there is a piercing irony there if you are astute enough to catch it. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 6:40:42 PM | "My outlook and my life are correspondingly brighter these days."
Those are your words, not mine. I was responding to that. I reiterate, relax, not everybody is trying to provoke you. Certainly not me. When I said it would be interesting to read some of your lighter work I meant just that. If you're looking for a challenge, I'll be happy to present you with one, but my words are not challenging in nature. Just conversational.
Okay? | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 8:41:59 PM |
What am I? An appendage
haha exactly.
hey, you just look mean. maybe watch more Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
and think about him when you are in situations where you feel you must be
tough. Children feel safe around Fred Rogers, and i've been thinking maybe
the Narrow Way that one must take is kind of like acting like he did.
It's embarassing to be like that- but after all we are all really like that
on the inside. Maybe that is the "trial by fire" in life:
To be like the Fred Rogers's of the world.
Oh yeah, sorry I should be commenting more on your [monologue?]
I think it's funny. I agree with it actually. Just I wish you were acting more like
Fred Rogers about it, or Yoda. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/24/2009 9:42:05 PM | I never even sent that email to the lady I was talking about. What would be the point? I really wanted nothing from her and she lives on the island.
I DO NOT approach women on this site. They come to me for their own reasons.
And I let them...for my own reasons.
And I respond or not...for my own reasons.
That's it! I'm letting this go. It's not even about my writing anymore, really. I lost interest.
Addendum: If life itself does not provoke one, why even bother coming here?
You are not catching my vision, but you are not obliged to. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 7:28:49 AM | Wow... aren't you a smooth dude.... Mr. Right just could be your evil twin....  | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 7:56:07 AM | Wow... aren't you a smooth dude.... Mr. Right just could be your evil twin....
^^^
Are you on the rag? What's with the sour grapes? Are you a 56 year old hippie troubadour? Isn't that kind of stale? Poor mans Grizzly Adams? Working class hero? Trucker poet, dime store philosopher?
Judging from your cornball, self indulgent profile, your "style" is making me look like Hemingway. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 7:19:38 PM | | I'm sorry for any misunderstanding. I think if you re-read what I wrote without the anger you'll see that everything I said could be taken another way. I am not a confrontational person. I'm sorry if I got personal, it was not my intention. I was simply commmenting the same way I usually do. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 7:20:41 PM | | Also when I referred to a challenge, I meant a writing challnege, like the other one I posted. | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 8:00:23 PM | All is forgiven. Yes, I do have thin skin. I'm not writing fiction. It's the chance I take.
As far as a challenge...my style is set. Period. I have nothing to develop. I am at one remove. I just want to chronicle periods of my life. If others want to read it, fine.
I have to do it anyway.
Thundershowers here. They came out of nowhere.
Sometimes when it's really hot the sky breaks. I got to work all night in this sh1t. Oh, well. Supposed to get back to sun tomorrow.  | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/25/2009 11:49:38 PM | Did you tell me before that you were born in Colorado?
Am I obliged to be happy? I don't even care if I'm happy. What has happy got to do with living?
Happiness is a state of mind. The choice is yours.
Here is another one: "What do you do for fun?" Well, aside from beating off, not much.
You crack me up.
 | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/26/2009 8:07:14 AM | Yeah at the army hospital. My dad was drafted. Peace time draft. He was a dentist. He gave Eisenhower's secretary a filling.
Yes, Brenda happiness is a state of mind. The choice is mine. BUT WHOSE F**KING BUSINESS IS IT IF I'M HAPPY OR NOT?
Not that I'm upset or anything...
I had a boxman at State Line. He got a job as a floorman at the Hard Rock Cafe Casino, in town there by Koval Lane.
I phone him up a month later. Maybe he could juice me in? It was a hot job. You know, on dice.
I ask him "Well, how do you like it?"
"Oh, it's okay, but at the end of the night my face hurts from smiling."
This guy was obliged to have a paternal smile pasted on his goddamn face for 8 straight hours because this was a strip casino (off strip, but the same).
Sharks eyes and a paternal smile.
I'll be happy when I'm dead, Brenda. I promise.  | |
|
| Oatmeal, pap.
Posted: 7/26/2009 8:50:46 AM | BP, I went through the same thing, 99 percent of my writing when I first started was nonfiction, and I was startled by the number of people who reacted to things and the manner in which they did. Some were supportive, some were judgmental. Just so you know that my writing is not aways sweetness and light, here's a sample from a new novel I'm working on ...
-1-
Cotton Battles had a habit of going outside on the front porch to smoke and to read, thus ruining his lungs and improving his mind all at the same time. It was when he went out one bright Monday afternoon in late spring, a mystery novel, a pack of filtered camels and a half-empty book of matches in his left hand, his good hand, that he first saw him.
The boy had started staying with his grandmother since school let out so that his mother could go to work. It was one of those summer time arrangements that you didn’t have to be there to overhear, it just suddenly became clear that that was what was going on; the school buses had ceased whizzing through the neighborhood, the kids on their bikes had appeared going up and down the road all day long and the boy was being dropped off at dawn and picked up at dusk across the street at 2209 Poplar every business day. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out.
In between reading and smoking, Cotton watched the boy closely, peering over the pages of his paperback. There was no way the boy could know that rather than perusing the pages of the book, Cotton was perusing him. The boy had proven to be infinitely more entertaining than the squirrels and birds. He moved about with all the casual abandon of an only child who had been left to his own devices more often than not, and felt he was pretty well so invisible.
He was a big boy—chunky, not fat—but well fed, and couldn't have been more than nine years old. His hair was cut short; a #2 by the guide on the electric clippers, close to the scalp, and the color of a new fawn between the spots. Cotton didn’t know his name, and didn’t really need to know it because he was every boy. Cotton immediately christened him Little Man, and settled down into his battered front porch recliner to smoke and read and watch his way through the day.
Tuesday morning Cotton watched Little Man battle the forces of evil with a red plastic sword. Watched him over the lines of text in his book as he attacked tree branches and sent leaves scattering under his awesome sword-wielding power. He twirled on his toes and spun around (to get the bad guys that were creeping up behind him) with the grace of seasoned ninja.
“Yaaaaahhh!” he cried.
“Boy!” his grandma hollered out the kitchen window, “stop whackin’ at my trees!”
Even from where Cotton was sitting, he could hear the boy’s soft giggle.
Wednesday it rained and Little Man was stuck inside the house and Cotton had to content himself with the birds and the squirrels again, shuddering all the while in sympathy for Little Man who was stuck in that house with the hag.
Early Thursday morning Little Man was deposited in the driveway of his grandmother’s house, and the wheezing Toyota Corolla belonging to his mother squeaked it’s way down Poplar Street and then turned onto Avenue K, belching a cloud of black smoke in its wake as it accelerated toward the highway. The boy squatted immediately to gather some loose gravel and began feeding the little rocks one by one into a red soda straw. Propelled by short bursts of breath, the gravel began to ping off the side of the house, and one ricocheted off the late model Cadillac that rested in the driveway with a hollow metallic chink.
“Did something hit my car?” Grandma wanted to know, her voice careening out of an open window in the house and barreling across the street like a rail car with greased wheels slipping down the tracks out of control. Cotton had an insane urge to duck so that the voice couldn’t touch him, the voice that spoke to years of tobacco and hard liquor, carried on breath that he knew would smell of denture adhesive, decay and impending death. The voice stopped just short of where he sat … he watched it in his mind’s eye … an invisible greenish mist dying in the choking weeds at the edge of the road, and he sighed with relief. It hadn’t even come close.
“No ma’am!” the boy lied. He had frozen in place, and then instinct kicked in and he flung the handful of gravel he’d been holding in his right hand and tossed the soda straw behind him into the street with his left. The door to the house banged open and Grandma stood in the gaping hole, a faded blue house dress hanging from her withered frame like a threadbare towel tossed over the back of a chair.
“What’re you doin’ anyway?” she demanded.
“Nuthin’,” the boy replied honestly; at the moment he wasn’t doing a damned thing.
Now if she’d asked what he had BEEN doing, Cotton would have had some idea of what Little Man was capable of. As it turns out, Little Man was no dummy. He wasn’t doing anything at the exact second she asked the question so he was safe—he hadn’t lied.
“Well, keep it that way,” Grandma said ominously, and retreated back into the house.
Little Man’s shoulders slumped slightly, but he retrieved the soda straw and went back to his target practice. He knew and Cotton knew that Grandma had maybe one get up and go check in her per hour, and she had just used the first one of the day.
#
Cotton had made up his mind long ago that the world was going to hell in a handcart. He had know it the day the first bra had been burned, and his small town had greeted him with scowls and hateful glances when he had returned from Viet Nam after fighting in the “war.” That’s the way it was printed in most rag newspapers … in quotes as though it hadn’t been a real war but a pretend one. Well, Cotton knew better. It didn’t matter why the war had happened or whether it was right or wrong, it was a war and one of the ugliest in history. He had realized this the first time one of his buddies had died after shoving his****into a Vietnamese whore who had lined her vagina with some sort of device that turned his Johnson into hamburger. Shredded it like so much taco-bound cheddar cheese. He hadn’t realized he’d been bleeding to death as he pumped his way to heaven; it was supposed to be warm and wet down there, wasn’t it? Hadn’t realized that he was dying until he came and went at almost the same instant.
Cotton knew that the “war” was a dishonorable war when he was warned about approaching children that might be wired with explosives. Had known it when the propaganda had fallen from the sky like confetti during a parade. Had known it when good strong men had bent under the pressure and massacred full villages of women and children, raped young female refugees and smashed their slant-eyed, yellow faces with rifle butts for protesting too loudly.
Cotton knew that the world was a shit hole by simply listening to the news and the sow next door, who had made it her personal mission to “bring him into the twenty-first century”.
By Thursday afternoon Cotton had seen enough of Little Man to know that the boy was prime material. This time he would succeed. This time he would proceed with caution. Not like he had done with his own son. After twenty-three years Cotton was able to admit that he had ****ed up royally with John. Had pushed him too hard, and too fast and hadn’t taken into account the pressure that John was feeling from society. Cotton had not been prepared for how quickly a boy’s mind could be ruined beyond repair simply by attending public school where teachers left off a math lesson five minutes early to preach religion or politics. ****ing with young minds, insidiously brainwashing them over twelve interminable years, whacking away at the foundation of morality that they were being taught at home, and after 12 years of this brain ****, spitting out assertive and aggressive young women, and confused young men who didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
#
A cat had crept into the yard at 2209 Poplar and Little Man spied it instantly. It was late afternoon, the sun was beginning to make long shadows between the trees that only Tuesday had been full of bad guys that the boy had chased high into the branches with his red plastic sword. Cotton lowered his book and stared openly. Cat and boy regarded each other from a distance of five or six yards. In the distance the creak of the Toyota Corolla could be heard, clanking it’s way down Avenue K. Little Man sat frozen while the cat crept ever closer to the boy, who had lifted his hand in a welcoming gesture.
“Kitty, kitty ...”
Little Man’s words floated across the street to where Cotton sat, his eyes glued on the cat and boy, holding his breath. The cat was within five feet now, the Corolla—two blocks.
“Come on,” Little Man practically sang. “I won’t hurt you,” he promised.
“Reeeeooow.” the cat responded, cautiously closing the distance.
Two feet now, and Cotton could almost smell the exhaust of from the Corolla, could feel the heat of it on his face.
Almost simultaneously the Corolla entered Cotton’s peripheral vision and Little Man jabbed viciously at the cat with the sharp end of a short stick. The cat shrieked in pain and fright and jettisoned itself across the driveway and under the front end of the Corolla that was swinging in a veering arc off of Poplar Street. Almost as quickly it shot out the other side of the car, no worse for the wear save for the sore spot from the stick.
“What the hell was that?” Little Man’s mother stuck her head out the driver’s window and regarded her son with thinly veiled suspicion.
“I dunno,” he replied, shrugging, and then “… bye, Grandma!”
He bounded around the front end of the car and virtually threw himself into the front seat.
As the Toyota backed haphazardly into the street and took off with a bang, Cotton Battles sat in his recliner in the gathering evening shadows and smiled. This one, he thought, was one he could work with. | |
|
|
|
Home
login 
