December 14th, 2018

Throwback: April 14 and 15, 2009

This is new

Boring work anecdote: I have been working on a very long story for quite some time. I tried to some of the structural issues with such a long piece by breaking it into sections. There are 4, and each was originally named for something the characters try to purchase or get within the section: Dress, Car, Salad, and Repair. Just now, beginning to go over some details in the final section, I find that someone who is most likely me has changed the title to Light. Light???? What did I mean by that? Seriously, I can’t make one connection between that title and the content of the section, let alone remember my actual thought process when I chose it. Could this be a very specific computer virus, or a sign that I’m working too much when I’m tired?

NOTE from the future: I have no memory of any of this, including what story I was working on. But wait…

April 15, 2009: Fest

Still struggling with the same story as last night. I’ve finally cut a paragraph that hasn’t been needed in a long time, but that I have a ridiculous fondness for. So, as with all my ridiculousnesses, I’m posting it here, just so it’ll have a home.

It’s hot in Western Ohio. It was hot in Montreal too, but back then it was also dawn, which gave your clothes some clearance from your body. Now everything is slicked tight, even the baggy canvas of his shorts, even the thin cotton of the street-stand t-shirt that says, Fest. It is a generic t-shirt, bought for four-dollars in Outremont when he spilled red wine at a party and ran downstairs to see if he could by a new one. For four dollars, he didn’t care what Fest it referred to, although here, in Western Ohio, with the rubber-decal letters sweating to the hair on his chest, he panics briefly that someone might ask him. Not Iz, of course; Iz was at the party.

NOTE from the future: Now I remember–I only ever wrote one story that went from Montreal to Western Ohio. This was published the following year in my chapbook Road Trips as “I Have Never Loved You Less” in a very different form. Man 2009 was a long time ago.