Category: Daily

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How Bad Could They Be?

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Malachi ashed his Lucky Strike then decided to leave it there in the glass dish he’d brought; you couldn’t smoke in a Texas diner.

“You know,” Malachi looked away and thumbed a torn corner of orange leatherette on the back of their booth, “I was lighting cigarettes for two years before I ever smoked one?” He turned his attention back to Karen. “Ever tell you that?”

Karen shook her head small because she was being quiet and trying to ken his screen. A smoke screen, she thought; she almost laughed aloud.

“Suppose not. You probably can’t imagine me as a kid.”

She smiled and let go part of her stored up laugh. “No. Not really.”

“My great grandfather had a stroke when I was seven, or there abouts. That summer when I was out of school and my mom was working at the cleaners she’d leave me with him. Myrtle, his second wife—we never called her great grandma—was already dead. My grandparents, his son, lived in the house next door.

[one of the points of his story—why he smokes—is because even though he heard the warnings that smoking was bad for you he saw his stroked great grandfather smoking and never die because of it, so he figured it was safer than anyone said it was]

216 words on day 895

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Meet Mike’s Sister Margie

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The Merriweather Balloon Boat & Mobile Market burned from the Crows’ Crow’s Nest to what would have been the waterline had it been a seafaring craft and not a…balloon boat (and mobile market). But I’m getting ahead of myself with the hook and you’ll be wanting a little less medias in your res.

Gondola Mike Evercotts cinched the last of his boxed cargo into the main net and tossed it overboard to dangle below his dad-made skiff—

—OK, some things will be easier if I just come right out and tell you: Mike goes by “Evercotts” and not Mike or Gondola Mike. When he did briefly go by ‘Gondola Mike’ they stressed the second syllable not the first, thus: ‘gone-DOE-luh mike’. He gondoliered for maybe two weeks one summer and it stuck—except that no one ever calls him that to his face. Usually you’ll hear people introduce him as “Gondola Mike Evercotts [as I did above], but just to call him ‘Evercotts’.” As I’m doing now. Also, he’s got iron-black hair and is shorter than you’d like him to be but as tall as he needs.

Also, it’s best if you imagine me narrating in something like an Irish accent—not a brogue though. Later my narrative accent—again,you should imagine—will drift into anything applicable from the western parts of Europe, Morocco, and once Italian…Italy. You know what I mean. However, for the ease of your reading I’ll be typing it all out in American English. I’ll just let you know which to imagine when we get there. For now, the Irish…

Oh, and just so you know, I can’t tell the difference between Irish and Scottish either, so it’s OK that you imagined that instead.

Evercotts cinched the last of his boxed cargo into the troller net and tossed it overboard to dangle below his dad-made skiff just aft of the green and blue pectoral sails. He wasn’t fond of this design in general or this boat—The Marmalade—in particular but he had to uphold the family image, and the wings-on-a-downstroke look of this skiff was a classic for The Evercotts Boatery. It was stable and suited for cargo; it wasn’t swift. Above, he gave the mainball a punch and it bounced back solidly, but he swung open the brass limned bezel of the pressure guage and gently strummed the needle anyway. The rapier-like needle shivered to a standstill at 21 goms. Patches and seams and stitches quilted The Marmalade’s mainball leaving it just a bit leaky; an extra gom would keep her from sinking between home and The Merriweather as long as Martin had reckoned rightly. Evercotts boarded the boat and checked the remainder of his rigging before casting off and engaging the puffer.

“Muh-ike! Muh-ike! Micheal?” He cut the puffer at the sound of his sister calling him. Margie ran down the grassy slope of the estate to the little-kid dock. She was hugging a pink and purple duffel.

333 words on day 894

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Dunno

I’ve given up days of writing here and there, and I think there was a whole month I missed a year or so back. I’ve not considered stopping until last night. I’m not entirely sure why the thought crossed my mind, but it did. It didn’t feel terribly wrong or out-of-place either. It didn’t seem scary. It seemed appropriate.

I’ve made it quite a ways into this 1000 days. Yes, I took 2000 getting there—sigh. So maybe that’s not all that good, but closing in on 900 is not a slouch numbers-wise.

As I considered why it was this idea surfaced at all, the theme that seemed to stick was a combination of lack of quality content and the imposition this effort has made on the balance of my life. I’d say in many ways the quality of the content here has degraded over the years. I’ve not made nearly as many new discoveries of plots as I had in the beginning. I’ve not stuck with the few new ones I have found. And I’ve definitely had fewer self-contained threads as I did in the first 100 days. I circle back to old favorites and just gnaw the bone; I don’t even get bloody gums and plastic in my shit for the effort—certainly no plot. On the other half of that combination, an hour is not a huge block of time in a day; an hour ought to be easy enough to find. I’ve illuminated those details in the past so I won’t do more than say here that for both internal and external reasons a consistent hour a day is hard to find.

When I’m faced with broken things at work I try to list out the options for where the solution could be found. Usually you can find three categories: nothing is wrong, you just think it’s broken, carry on; you are doing something wrong, you should change what you’re doing; the thing is unfixable and should be removed before being dwelt on too much longer—you’ve got better things to do. I modified these categories to make sense in this 1000 Days context.

I went to sleep with this on the brain. Of course my unconscious came to my aid and drew a colorful dream-picture of what all this meant. Let’s say the short version of that sleepy communiqué was that a clown had stolen my rightful job. I’m not sure my unconscious was taking all the variables into account to produce its little play. The clown was clearly good at what he was doing, but not doing anything I couldn’t; I’m not sure why I felt it was my right to have the role he usurped. In any case, lots of psychological fodder in those last few lines I’m sure.

So, am I giving up? Giving in? Deciding what’s right? Or am I going to fix what’s broken to make it better?

487 words on day 893