Rather than give this post a title like “The Write Way,” or “The Write of Way,” or “The Write Stuff,” as if being a quirky shut-in was some sort of professional by-product – even to be elevated as a symptom of the creative mind – I figured I’d be honest about it.

I’ve heard it said that running is great for writing, it allows time for contemplation, planning.

I disagree.

Running reminds me that I am a robot made of meat and slime. If I have neglected my slime, it hates me.

Five hundred meters from the edge of the lake is a small harbour onto the Atlantic Ocean. Also known as the Quidi Vidi Battery. Head on down to see graffiti on authentic cannons. Feel safe knowing that if the French ever attack by sea again, no problem, we got you covered.

But don’t worry, it's been at least ten years since they last attacked, and then they only sent one chain-smoker with a ferocious scowl. Frenchie, we called him. He was a ferocious one, Frenchie. The battle was mightily fought.

A girl of about fourteen was sitting one of the benches facing the lake, her feet drawn up, her head tucked down into her hoody. I was a Tortured Soul™ when I was a teenager, and didn’t really think much of it.

I won’t say much about the run itself other than it was satisfying and heroic. In my head I picture myself as a tanned Adonis holding his head high. In reality ... ever watch a Bassett Hound running towards you at full gallop?

Speaking of dogs, I’ve learned that when approaching a person with a dog, you can always look at the dog instead of the person to avoid awkwardness. Maybe even smile at the dog. That’s a tip for the other quirky shut-ins out there. The first one’s free.

Get out of my way ... damn slow people.

That great moment came when I reached the point where I knew I couldn’t fail. Arms raised like Rocky.

In my head.

Twenty minutes after I’d struck out, I flapped past the statue of The Rower again. I even ran on an extra twenty or thirty feet for good measure. My slime was satisfied.

It’s true what they say, the eye of the tiger is the thrill of the fight.

I scattered the lake’s ducks and pigeons and seagulls before me near the boat launch.

I had the guts, I got the glory, I went the distance, I didn’t wanna stop.

Just a man and his will to survive.

The girl was still there on the bench, her head tucked into an arm, peeking out when people passed, or lingered. Right about here is where I began to be beleaguered by my brain soaking up the landscape like a dry sponge. Sorry, but almost everything to this point has been opening credits and popcorn.

Right next to the lake sits a grocery store, a fancy one too, with escalators for the shopping carts and butlers for the potatoes. The week before I had gone in while still sweating like a pack mule and had left a stink-trail around the apples and avocados which hastened their ripening sharply. I didn’t want to do that again. It's hard to maintain a three foot barrier between yourself and everybody else in public while not looking like a maniac. 

I lingered by the ducks, and walked a ways around the pond, hanging over the rail of the bridge where the shallow rivermouth feeds brown water out into the deep. In the cold of the spring, my girlfriend and I would stand there whenever we brought bread. The ducks would come very close. She loved watching them, and I loved watching her be happy. I decided that I should come back soon with the heels of the loaves I had tucked away in my cupboards.

At heart, another excuse to get out of the house.

That’s when I realized, I really need to get back to my girlfriend.

I’m only thirty-four, and was already contemplating living like an old widower. All my life I’ve been secretly watching old men wandering through towns in afternoons, seemingly very interested in the dust of the gutters or the tacky frames of doorways. I’ve always thought them the saddest people in the land, sure that nobody but me was watching them.

Suddenly, I was contemplating early emulation, and realized how easy it is to fall into routines and escapism. Tired of seeing the inside of their homes, the feeble companionship of their TVs and radios, the old codgers went out into the world to feed themselves with different thoughts before they returned to their little kingdoms of boredom, happy to have seen the little flapping feet of the ducklings, the wary side-eyed glances from the mother-ducks. 

There used to be a lot more of them right after the fishery collapsed.

Either way, Boy, I can’t wait to see the missus again.

I didn’t want to think about the old men, and wandered closer to the shore. Another mother duck had ducklings held close, all of them with their heads tucked beneath their downy wings. She, too, eyed me warily, before nuzzling her head back beneath her wing. I stood there for five minutes, feeling the cool breeze sucking the moisture out of my armpits. My cotton shirt was damp and droopy. Sexy, very sexy.

Then a small cadre of juvenile ducks, probably the same guys as here in this four-month-old photograph, with no fear charged out of the water and right up near my feet, all of them watching me while trying not to look like they were watching me. Very cagey and cool, ducks. Comes from having their eyes near the sides of their heads. Popcorn kernels had been left on the park bench next to me, and I flicked them off onto the ground. The ducklings pounced on them quickly. Deciding, then, that I was a bust, they charged helter-skelter over to a nice lesbian couple twenty feet away. At the sight of twelve ducklings charging at them like paparazzi, I heard them say, Oh my god, how cute.

I’m not even going to try to describe the sound that twelve ducklings make when they charge down a walkway in unison. I don’t get out enough for that.

Right about here is where I realized I was a terrible person.

I looked across the way to see that the fourteen year old girl was still there with her head tucked down into her jacket. I also saw – though I rarely notice them, intent as I usually am on the lake – that she was sitting directly by the property boundary between the big Catholic graveyard and the walls of the provincial prison. I tagged that as interesting in a thematic sort of way.

Quick on the heels of that revelation, I had to contemplate the idea that I had passed that girl – not once – but twice, and it had never occurred to me to ask her if she was okay.

We don’t have much homelessness in our city, so that’s not a frontline thought, but for all I knew, she was hurt, or simply unhappy, and a hello might have helped. Hell, even if she were a Tortured Soul™, and was fishing for somebody to do just that, to inquire about her soul, there’d have been no harm in it.

That’s when I wished my girlfriend was around again. She’s unafraid to approach strangers and be kind.

Men around my age simply do not approach teenage girls. To do so is a breach of some kind of quiet code.

Then I thought, Well, fuck what other people think, I should be doing the right thing. I think we’re too careless and uncaring to people these days, and I try to generally spread common sense and kind words wherever I go, at the very least checking my own hostile tongues whenever they rise. To do so online in an anonymous fashion while shying away from it in the real world seems a fine line of hypocrisy.

But then I swung back the other way again. Nope. Grown men my age don’t approach young girls in public. That’s a fine line that’s drawn in our minds. If I were to walk up to her and inquire about the blackness of her soul, or to see if she had been in a fight or something – even if nobody else in the area saw – it’s likely that she herself would have thought I was a creep. No credit for not being a monster there.

We have a fear of lone men these days. We can’t be cowboys or saviours anymore, only dark menaces with dank basements in our souls. Even an act that, on the outside, appears to be as benevolent as flowers on a sunny day, is perceived as actually hiding a bubbling cauldron of base desires.

Women were allowed to approach her, I decided. Older women, especially. Older men were allowed, but would still merit being watched closely in case the basement door looked like opening.

I watched from afar, at least a hundred meters away across the lake. Anybody seeing me probably assumed I was leering at her. I wondered how many people, like me, would pass her by, and, in fact, I felt better when a lady leaned over her after only twenty or thirty seconds.  

Proud of my victorious stink, if not my own humanity, I went to the store feeling that not all was lost with humanity in general, or at least the specific humanity in my neighborhood.

Cheeze was on sale, and I decided to experience what it would be like to buy two.

(Spoiler: It was awesome.)

I don't have a snappy ending, so  I'll deliberately ruin my walk away into the sunset.

Oh man, did you see what I did there with the ducklings, their heads tucked under their wings, and then the girl doing the same thing too? 

Totally a writer.

Absolutely related.

Today, I came across what's being called the best, shortest, horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in
a room. There was a knock at the door.

                                            - Frederic Brown

I really like that story. Currently, I'm struggling to get through a rather verbose Brothers Karamazov, long and twisted, and so, to cope, I  went in search of a few more very short, short stories in order to keep the Brothers at bay a while. 

I had a similar such evening about a year ago. Probably the first time I tried reading The Brothers Karamazov. I solicited three-word stories from my facebook pals. Reading through them again, here's a few of my favorites:

Nunnery application? Exorcised.

Sinking? Later, captain.

I successfully shapeshifted.

Unexplored planet. Tentacles!

Invention traps woman.

Interstellar travel. Extinction.

Marathon. Bloody socks.

Unsolicited sadomasochism: rude.

Gorgeous! Want penis?

Groggy. Missing kidneys.

In my head, I sorta think the last two go together pretty well.

Another short, short story which tends to pop up from time to time comes from Ernest Hemingway. I've seen it before heralded as the shortest sad story:

"Classifieds: Baby goods. For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

Snopes.com, the internet's greatest resource for calling bullshit on just about any and every urban legend, cannot verify that Hemingway wrote the story over dinner as a bet the way the myth claims. Snopes does, however, snidely remark that the story does sound familiar to another story about a short, short story, that of the teacher's assignment to his class. When given the criteria that the essay had to be concise and contain elements of   1: Religion   2: Royalty   3: Sex   and 4: Mystery ... the winning student essay read:

"My God," said the Queen. "I'm pregnant. I wonder who did it!"

Snopes remarks that this story is probably bunk as well.

But by far, the best short, short stories I've come across while idly fleeing Russian loquaciousness comes from an issue of Wired magazine.  They asked many popular writers from diverse genres to write their own Hemingway-esque short, short stories, and got a lot of replies back. I think it's great how the personality and style of the authors really shines through in some of them even though they were limited to six words. Here's a few of my favorites:

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
- Stan Lee

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.
- Gregory Maguire

Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu -
no carrier.
- Charles Stross

Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please.
- Steven Meretzky

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
- Richard Powers

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

We went solar; sun went nova.
- Ken MacLeod

Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin

Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it.
- Brian Herbert

Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.
- Cory Doctorow

Heaven falls. Details at eleven.
- Robert Jordan

whorl. Help! I'm caught in a time
- Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel

God to Earth: “Cry more, noobs!”
- Marc Laidlaw

Help! Trapped in a text adventure!
- Marc Laidlaw

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Bang postponed. Not Big enough. Reboot.
- David Brin

Temporal recursion. I'm dad and mom?
- David Brin

Commas, see, add, like, nada, okay?
- Gregory Maguire

Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here."
- Steven Meretzky

Will this do (lazy writer asked)?
- Ken MacLeod

Those were my favorites of the bunch. The rest may be found at Wired:  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

I hope you've enjoyed these short, short stories. Back to Dostoyevsky I go.

Tonight I was digging through the *junk drawer* in my room, actually a rubbermaid container still loaded down with the outlier pieces of my last move and whatever bric a brac resisted my attempts to place it fittingly around the room at any given time. In the bottom, amidst the accumulated dust, the precious lost paper clips which could have proved useful so many times, and many escaped batteries, potentially dead, I found the guitar pick pictured below. Across the top, in perfect typewriter talk, it says 'Guilty steak ...' and below that: 'pearls in the sand.'

I plucked it out of the dust, blew it off,  and pocketed it as personal archaeology. It stems from a period a couple years back when I was editing my novel, Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a sailor wrongfully exiled to the infamous leper colony on the Hawaiian Kalaupapa peninsula.  I don't recall why I was printing those particular pages - perhaps so I could expunge the sentence at hand in a fiery ritual - I only recall that the page came out of my old Canon with a pick-shaped hole in the text. When I dug around, there it was, the proverbial monkeywrench in the works. I like to think that it was trying to tell me something, seeing that the paragraph stamped on the pick is perhaps the worst I wrote in the entire book.


Judge for yourself:

Makes me flinch to read it. Portraying dreams in entertainment should be outlawed.

In my defense, the piece underwent a good flaying for defying good sense, order, and taste, and in the final tally was convinced to read like this:

At first I thought it was unlucky that the pick had been tattooed with one of the worst lines of my piece. I thought perhaps a sequel to the previous fiery ritual was in order. In the end, however, I erred on the side of good ol' fashioned hands-in-pockets deterrence. I figured I'd let it serve as a reminder that not everything shoots out of my fingertips as gems. Usually, it takes time, perseverence, and polishing.

Of course, the next time I get in a literary huff, into the fire it goes.

I'm ravenously hungry. I've been writing a query letter for six hours. Finally the roar of my brain stops and my stomach is raving mad, shaking its fist at me. It's piss-pouring rain. I have no food in the house.

I go downstairs and cut off a hunk of stale beer bread with cheeze so I won't deflate into a shrunken nothingness and fall into the gutter on my way to the grocery store. I'd hate for someone to find me lying there the next day dirty and wet like one of those discarded gloves that seem to grow from roadside gravel.

There's rain, there's splashing cars and wet pant’s cuffs, but hey, I get there and perogies are on sale 2 for 1 so it's all worth it. Mmmm perogies.

It's often said that you should never shop for groceries when you're hungry. Normally the old adage rings true. But there's another adage that says Man cannot live on bread alone, and a bit of bread was all I was running on. I was in no danger of buying too many groceries. Even if I could fit them all into my shared fridge (that's another story), my hunger had rendered me desperate far and beyond the point of caring about what old wives say. I got what groceries I needed and geared up to get out.

Everybody has a mundane superpower. Mine is the ability to get drinks quick at any bar regardless of how crowded the bar is. For me the gaps in the gabbering girls and guys in tight shirts open like magic (that sounds spurious but I'm sticking with it. The magic works at concerts too). At the time I realized this I was giddy with power. It was only slowly that I came to also realize that every superpower, even the mundane ones, comes with a price.

If with great power comes great responsibility, then with minor power comes, well, minor annoyances. I'm superman at the bar. Give me all your liquor money, citizen, and stand back. But never, ever, pick the same line as me at the supermarket.

I go to the line with only one man with one basket. He's wearing a cap and a grubby jacket, grubby jeans. He's a grubby guy. When I moved downtown I was concerned I wouldn't have any fun at the supermarket anymore because I wasn't haunting the aisles at 2 AM. Fortunately, it turns out I don't have to worry.

The grubby guy put his basket on the conveyer, and as it moved forward towards the cashier he'd slide it back towards me. Two times he does this. The cashier rings the grubby purchases through, the grubby basket is conveyed towards the front, the grubby guy pushes it towards the back. I can't put my own purchases down because I'm feeling the barrier of politeness; his basket is there. My own is getting heavy.

Finally the cashier, seeing the traveling basket is empty, stashes it behind the counter, sliding the bar to separate the groceries down my way. I began putting my groceries onto the counter. The grubby man, having lost his grubby basket that was acting as a buffer, begins picking up my groceries and placing them at the back of the conveyer.

I stop. I don't like anybody touching my groceries. That's taboo. A taboo I heartily endorse. Although it seems a dotted line that gets broken fairly often (ask me about the old man who purposefully squished my cake). Mostly I'm shocked this guy is picking up my groceries and moving them as if he has some sort of demilitarized zone lined out near the front of the conveyer that my food is violating.

The conveyer, of course, works on a sensor. An item places on the conveyer will move up until another sensor stops it. It's not going to stop while there's items on the belt. Seeing the guy was obviously not going to stop, the cashier halts the belt. This time when the grubby guy manhandles my groceries, they stay where he wants. Neither I nor the cashier are impressed by this grubby man's attempt at perpetual motion.

The worst is over, I think. Problem solved. Our hero may return home happy with his spicy pizza.

No so.

The grubby man whips out his pen and a cheque. I look up at his tally on the blue screen. Twenty-three dollars worth of cat food, wieners, and crystal lite. It's like an odd kind of poetry seeing the same items repeated on the supermarket screens.

Crystal Lite - 250g -                          99c

Crystal Lite - 250g -                          99c

Wieners

Wieners

Yes, a glimpse into my world.

The cashier can't cash the cheque for the grubby man. She doesn't have the authority. She has to go check in with her supervisor in regards to the cheque. She leaves.

The grubby man seems nervous. He steps five feet away from where I am and begins pacing, pacing, his hands behind his back, pacing. It's over five minutes the cashier is gone verifying the veracity of the legal paper exchange and he paces all the while. Pacing.

When the cashier comes back she brings with her a sympathetic look for me as if to say sorry. Me with my meager groceries spread out on the conveyer belt, excluding the demilitarized zone near the front. Waiting. I don't look at her, though I saw. In truth, I don't mind. I've been in my room all day writing damnable dull query letters. Compared to that a good jab with a sharp stick would be preferable. I'm actually kind of amused. I'm already seeing the words 'I'm ravenously hungry. I've been writing a query letter for six hours' in my head.

She asks the grubby man for more pieces of identification, which he promptly whips out. Identifying himself is probably his mundane super power. Probably a pretty useful one seeing how grubby he is. The cashier shoots me another sympathetic look, having not caught my eye yet, and leaves again.

This time, instead of pacing, the grubby man begins to study my purchases. He never looks at me. Never once does he acknowledge that I exist. He's as leisurely as if he's pawing through the apple bin, leaving grubby bits over every Granny Red that he touches. He picks up my tuna and reads the label. It doesn't captivate him so he picks up my green bananas. They are very green. Green doesn't meet up with his measure. He puts them down and returns to his pacing, pacing.

Five minutes more goes by and the cashier returns. The grubby man's project of twenty three dollars has been approved. Proud new owner of twenty three dollars worth of cat food, crystal lite, and wieners, the grubby man picks up his bags and goes. Real life continues.

My own purchases had no duplicates, no poetry. Green bananas, spicy chicken pizza, tomato ... just doesn't have the same ring.

On the way home it was still raining. All the pretty girls had their hoods up and their pretty eyes shone out of dark cloth tunnels.

Who am I kidding? Pretty girls don't walk, especially in the rain. Who knows what monstrosities were hiding inside the mouths of those hoods?

Oh wait. I did have a duplicate.

Perogies.

Perogies.

2 for 1.

Mmmm.

So worth it.

From Here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/04/the-old-man-and-the-sea-marcel-schindler/

I haven't read 50 shades. And I've pretty much just assured myself that I never will.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a 2011 American animated short film directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, and produced by Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana. Described as an "allegory about the curative powers of story", the film centers around bibliophile Lessmore and his custodianship of a magical library of flying books. It was created using computer animation, miniatures and traditional hand-drawn techniques.

After winning over a dozen film festivals, the film was awarded the Best Animated Short Film at the 84th Academy Awards.

1:  On the first date, try to impress a girl by telling her you can bend spoons with your mind.

2:  Invent a language of your own. Decide that the first girl to decipher it will be The One.

Sometimes it seems very incongruous that we check the credentials of every author we read, but going to the barber, we just sit down in the chair and say, "Sure, define how I look for the next six weeks...."