Why do some of my blogs not post? Rachel? Help?
I hope this posts...
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Beautiful and the Abandoned
Ok, so the unicorn story is just on the threshold of not being corny, but I think it would take a better writer than myself to keep the central allegory from degenerating into total silliness, so I gave up. I decided I'm going to write something different. Something I was thinking about last night. Hopefully it doesn't become silliness:
My hometown is such a melancholy place; a city of empty buildings and long, pedestrian-less streets. It's an old place, for the south, and many of the buildings are over a hundred and fifty years old. I go home every year for Christmas and walk around there a lot, beautifully aimless and alone in the winter darkness, the dry leaves following me in the wind, lightly tracing the path on the pavement behind me. I think about things; anything. Nothing. It doesn't matter.
Some of the shells I sometimes imagine to be bustling businesses. Cafe's, bookstores, restaurants-- a regular bohemian village, where every Saturday morning people are out walking their dogs, stopping into bakeries to eat eclaires, or poking their heads into the local art gallery to see if there is anything new, different, wild, or even just to say Hey, Buzz, how's it going? One building looks like it used to house a theater. I imagine Saturday nights where people could go and watch a community play, then stop into the cafe around the corner for a cappucino afterwards, perhaps sit outside in the square and talk.
On Sunday mornings, when everyone is tucked away snuggly into churches, or, for the more modern, into bed, the downtown is beautifully deserted. All blue skies and brisk, Christmas air, tree-lined streets with old, uninhabited antebellums, and most importantly, silence. The silence is profound. I like to climb on top of some of the shells on mornings like this, perhaps smoke a cigarette, and lay there.
Recently sad attempts have been made to reorganize a downtown community, but the city continues to expand eastward, away from the old center, and out towards ([new, air conditioned, multi-level parking lotted strip malls. The pastures and forests I used to play in when I was younger have been levelled off.]-don't like this; change later if ever in mood.). Whenever there is a big event, people flood the streets down there and swarms back and forth, a chaotic kind of aimlessness. The next mornings are always the worst, especially if the event was on a Saturday. The gutters and sidewalks are strewn with red plastic cups and Subway wrappers.
So I think, as I lay there, high and watching the clouds drift over the tops of my city's empty buildings, Thank God for strip malls.
Hmm... not exactly what I intended, but I like the conflicting views of my city. Maybe work on later...
My hometown is such a melancholy place; a city of empty buildings and long, pedestrian-less streets. It's an old place, for the south, and many of the buildings are over a hundred and fifty years old. I go home every year for Christmas and walk around there a lot, beautifully aimless and alone in the winter darkness, the dry leaves following me in the wind, lightly tracing the path on the pavement behind me. I think about things; anything. Nothing. It doesn't matter.
Some of the shells I sometimes imagine to be bustling businesses. Cafe's, bookstores, restaurants-- a regular bohemian village, where every Saturday morning people are out walking their dogs, stopping into bakeries to eat eclaires, or poking their heads into the local art gallery to see if there is anything new, different, wild, or even just to say Hey, Buzz, how's it going? One building looks like it used to house a theater. I imagine Saturday nights where people could go and watch a community play, then stop into the cafe around the corner for a cappucino afterwards, perhaps sit outside in the square and talk.
On Sunday mornings, when everyone is tucked away snuggly into churches, or, for the more modern, into bed, the downtown is beautifully deserted. All blue skies and brisk, Christmas air, tree-lined streets with old, uninhabited antebellums, and most importantly, silence. The silence is profound. I like to climb on top of some of the shells on mornings like this, perhaps smoke a cigarette, and lay there.
Recently sad attempts have been made to reorganize a downtown community, but the city continues to expand eastward, away from the old center, and out towards ([new, air conditioned, multi-level parking lotted strip malls. The pastures and forests I used to play in when I was younger have been levelled off.]-don't like this; change later if ever in mood.). Whenever there is a big event, people flood the streets down there and swarms back and forth, a chaotic kind of aimlessness. The next mornings are always the worst, especially if the event was on a Saturday. The gutters and sidewalks are strewn with red plastic cups and Subway wrappers.
So I think, as I lay there, high and watching the clouds drift over the tops of my city's empty buildings, Thank God for strip malls.
Hmm... not exactly what I intended, but I like the conflicting views of my city. Maybe work on later...
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
To Touch the Fabled Horn, Part 1 (rough draft)
We'd been hunting for the last surviving unicorn for 7 years before we finally found him; following every tip, listening to every drunken old-timer in every deep-valley village all the way up Scandanavia, smelling every pile of dung for traces of ivory, checking every footprint for flakes of gold. Every day brought a new promise, something new to be disillusioned by, but every night brought disappointment, a fresh cold to chill us as we slept. The years passed slowly; glaciers made more progress melting than we did finding the unicorn, it seemed. The last 2 years had hit us the hardest; after Gulliver fell the rest of the camp seemed to grow slimmer with each sunrise. Nightly disappearances and reconnaissance escapes were regular; people we'd been travelling with for years too ashamed to acknowledge defeat or fear, slipping away soundlessly into the hostile night. What was once 15 soon became just 3: me, Lancelot, and Ahab-- the only 3 with nothing left on earth but our survivalist wits, a few supplies, and, of course, our crossbows.
But I should begin in the beginning.
It was well past the middle of the journey of my life when I was first contacted for the mission. Had you asked me at the time, however, I would have told you it was well past the end of my life's journey. But resurection on the written page came, eventually (though I honestly can't tell how I feel about that now), in the form of a comission by ________ to hunt the last surviving unicorn. My instructions were simple: with the crossbow and paltry supply of arrows ("dipped in the devil's blood," he told me) he supplied me with, along with a hand-picked party of "similar spirits" (another coinage of his), track down and kill the unicorn. When it was dead, or, hell, just lying on the ground blinking, stunned, perhaps even futilely kicking and neighing out the last ounces of its thousand-year existence, I was to saw its horn off without actually touching it. Put a bag beneath it, hold onto the head and saw till it fell safely into the bag. Once the horn was touched, he told me, the magic became perverted. I was never told what magic the horn contained, but, at the time, I cared little. Anything to save me from the dry fate of high school English classes.
All I ever found out about ________ was that he was a master-- had actually made a fortune-- at creating secret passageways through bookshelves and into elaborate fantasies; sometimes, he told me, he set trap doors in the paths of the pacing contemplative for them to stumble into and awake lost in an enchanted forest. Some form of extraterrestial technology, I supposed. His lust for the unicorn's horn remained a mystery, but we were all intelligent enough to assume it had something to do with his fantasies. I would later be the only one to whom this presumption was confirmed.
Uhh... to be continued. Perhaps.
But I should begin in the beginning.
It was well past the middle of the journey of my life when I was first contacted for the mission. Had you asked me at the time, however, I would have told you it was well past the end of my life's journey. But resurection on the written page came, eventually (though I honestly can't tell how I feel about that now), in the form of a comission by ________ to hunt the last surviving unicorn. My instructions were simple: with the crossbow and paltry supply of arrows ("dipped in the devil's blood," he told me) he supplied me with, along with a hand-picked party of "similar spirits" (another coinage of his), track down and kill the unicorn. When it was dead, or, hell, just lying on the ground blinking, stunned, perhaps even futilely kicking and neighing out the last ounces of its thousand-year existence, I was to saw its horn off without actually touching it. Put a bag beneath it, hold onto the head and saw till it fell safely into the bag. Once the horn was touched, he told me, the magic became perverted. I was never told what magic the horn contained, but, at the time, I cared little. Anything to save me from the dry fate of high school English classes.
All I ever found out about ________ was that he was a master-- had actually made a fortune-- at creating secret passageways through bookshelves and into elaborate fantasies; sometimes, he told me, he set trap doors in the paths of the pacing contemplative for them to stumble into and awake lost in an enchanted forest. Some form of extraterrestial technology, I supposed. His lust for the unicorn's horn remained a mystery, but we were all intelligent enough to assume it had something to do with his fantasies. I would later be the only one to whom this presumption was confirmed.
Uhh... to be continued. Perhaps.
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