Just Anything

I'm sitting on my purple leather couch, which was given to me by my parents, and was part of the cause of my first car wreck. My lady, Michelle, is standing outside in the snow and ice, wearing my teal flip-flops and feeding birds on the patio. She only started feeding the birds this week. I believe it's out of boredom, but she says that it's because she wants to help the poor little critters. The recent icy, then snowy, then snowy icy weather made driving impractical and dangerous. Everywhere I go, I overhear people talking to each other about their experiences with the icy roads, as if they were hardened drivers, crystalized by the terror of the North Texas snow.

Right now, one of Michelle's cats is staring at a mockingbird through a plate glass door. The bird's chest is puffed out, defiant, cautious. The bird hops down to where Michelle had placed the stale crushed snickerdoodles five minutes ago. I'm trying to write something, just anything to create journal entries for my fiction class. I pretty much hate most of what I'm writing these days. I feel like I have no purpose or direction as a writer. I've been abandoned by words.

I'm probably going to post a lot now.

So I'm writing for my fiction class right now, and I'm a bit stumped. I feel like what I'm writing is kind of good, but I have no direction for it, so it makes it seem like each step forward is really a step sideways. The document I'm writing only has to be 3 pages, but I'm having so much trouble coming up with even a single sentence.

I've been writing all night (since I got home today, anyway), and it's all been a struggle. Writing creatively is difficult when you want it to be good.

I don't really know how to end this post.

I don't know what to write.

I'm supposed to write a lot of journal entries for my Fiction class, but I honestly don't know what to write about. I have a list of "firsts," as you may see by my two previous posts, but none of them seem any good to me right now. I think I'll check on this site I found to help with writer's block. This is the prompt it gave me.

A quiet suburban cul-de-sac. A child's bicycle lies on its side, one wheel slowly turning.


Here we go.

A quiet suburban cul-de-sac. A child's bicycle lies on its side, one wheel slowly turning, the front wheel bent. A car pulled up to the downed metal heap in query of its status. The headlights peered over the spokes and chains, dirtied with bicycle grease. The car crept closer to the bike, crunching tiny pebbles between tires and concrete, making them even tinier. Shadows of the bicycle's body swung from the frame, connecting only at the parts where it touched the concrete. The shadows were like the tiny pebbles.

The driver exited the car, every breath turned to clouds in the chilled night. The car engine continued to run, the headlights stilled and illuminated the broken bicycle. The man, a lanky figure with gangly legs and even ganglier arms, reached to the bike and touched its handlebar. His finger stung from the miniature lightning bolt that flashed between him and the bar.

Fiction Journal

I know I'm making several posts in one day. Just bear with me, dear reader(s). This entry is probably going to be really short, as I only wrote it within a few minutes. It's another "First."

First Sip of Coffee (Sorry for Telling this One Again, Dad).


I was out with my family, June of the year I beat Zelda: Link to the Past. We were at a plant nursery; it was 100 degrees. My throat was dry. It was a desert cave at noon. I was sweating all of the water from my body, but it wanted more to sweat. I believed in death by thirst in these moments. There were fountains with babies, chubby and winged, pissing clear water into troughs where it recirculated to become more piss. Like my sweat.

I pleaded with Dad to let me drink from the fountain. He suggested his coffee. My dad liked his coffee black, and somehow, despite the swelter of June, the thermos let it get cold. I sipped it as my mom warned me against it. Disgust. Spit take.
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Not very good.

Journal for Fiction Class

Well, my Intro to Fiction Writing teacher said that I could use the computer to do my daily journals, so I think that's what I'll do. Today, I'm going to do one of the "First" exercises. If you're not familiar with it, they're exercises where I just write and write and write about the "first" something; it can be anything, like the first time I drank coffee, or my first kiss, or the first time I ate cheese. Whatever I want. This one is the first time I climbed a tree (even though really, it's not completely true).

The Left Mimosa 

It was a mimosa tree in my grandparents' back yard, well, there were two really, but the left one sucked. I would climb into the branches of the tree, thinking about lazing like a gibbon in the jungle. My sister would come outside mere seconds after me, demanding the use of the right mimosa, but I had already settled into it and I was the gibbon. More accurately, I was a sloth, full to the brim with berries and fruit flies, them buzzing in my belly, eating the fruit as I was digesting it. Their tiny lives would be over soon, but for that moment, they had a feast in front of them.

I sat in the tree, my sister stood below awaiting my departure, the fruit flies gorged. I told her to climb the left tree, but she wouldn't have it. My older sister believed in the authority given by God's egg timer.

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Well, that's it for that one. I just wanted to get that one down in some more permanent form than my notebook. I actually wrote that one during class on the first day. Yay school!