Passages to Nowhere

  Because this is a new incarnation of my old blog and I hadn't posted anything on that thing for over a year, I figured I would just start off clean and put up some passages from things I started writing but never finished.  You see what I did there with the title?  Get it?  Fuck I'm lame.  Without further adieu, here are two excerpts.

Transcendence

Written 02/27/10

Inspired by listening to "Transcendence" from Oskoreien's Illusions EP

  I imagined sheets silhouetting the curves of a body.  I felt that warmth press hard against my ribs from the inside, and the sadness of knowing that I must eventually leave.  Then I am at a battlefield.  A combatant on the losing side, fighting beside too many with too little time to care about any of them, and against a faceless enemy who owns my full attention.  Selfish survival is the only thing in this place of burning bodies and crying voices worth working for.  Then I am alone there, hiding from my fate while remembering the silhouette under the sheets, but still unable to feel anything more than the survival, and the sadness of knowing that I must eventually leave.

Indifference

Written sometime in late 2009 and edited today

Inspired by "Vitamins" in Raymond Carver's "Cathedral", a hospital visit, and personal conflict.

 The artificial odor of apples and cinnamon ran high in the air. The chair he sat in felt as if it once had been the failed attempt at a roll cage of an automobile and crudely fashioned into a seat.  The sickening pale green of the walls were enough to make him vomit just from their sight out of his peripheral vision.  The magazine he held had little effect on his disgust, and in fact, intensified it.  "Women experiencing involuntary vaginal seepage should consult a doctor as it may be a sign of infection which could lead to kidney failure."  No shit.  They have such boring fucking magazines in these places.  He felt sweat bead off of the edge of hair at the top of his forehead.  His boredom was excruciating.
  "Mr. Hughes." said the nurse.  He looked up at her.  "Please come with me."  He followed her.  He tried his best to ignore the sterility of the halls.  Her face and breasts were not exceptional, but her body was great.  Given these circumstances, he could hardly feel physical attraction.  She led him into a small office. "Please sit down." He sat down. She sat across the desk from him. "Mr. Hughes, there were complications during the surgery.  Your wife has passed away."  He looked at her indifferent.  "Mr. Hughes, I am deeply sorry for your loss.  Please believe we did everything we could to resuscitate your wife."  He felt relieved.  "If you need someone to speak with you, we have a priest, Father Bradshaw, on hand."  He nodded.  "Thank you, but that's fine."
  He walked out of the hospital alone.  He drove home past the beauty parlor, the grocery store and the steakhouse.  He thought about how much loved his wife.  Was it enough?

Sorry For This

(( Re-posted from my previous blogspot, which uses a email address I don't use and can't change...))

This is not a story. To those new to this blog (if you're reading this and you're not me, you're a newcomer since literally nobody at all read this blog before), on February 15th, 2009 I began to see if I could write a short story every day of the year, hopefully leading to me wanting to write a new story every single day for the rest of my life. No, I did not delete the stories. There never were any posted. You see, I'm a lazy son of a bitch so the whole project failed. Yeah, I began a few stories, but only about the opening paragraph. Most days, I didn't write a damn thing. I wanted to, I really did. But I felt I was a failure if I couldn't create a 12+ page short story in a single day that was worth half a damn, and I knew I could not write even 10 pages of anything that I wouldn't just call absolute garbage and throw out. I basically ended up throwing away a lot of really good ideas that were buried in rubbish prose.

I have now realized something that I thought I knew long before I started the blog: being a good writer hardly, if at all, involves how much and how fast you can write. It's absurd. Why did I even begin to think that would work? Well, probably my involvement with a screenplay for about a year and a half at that point had something to do with it. I felt I didn't have the time to focus on other ideas while writing that screenplay, it was too important. All that time, every idea I had was strictly for the screenplay. So I put it on hiatus and felt free. Felt like I could, in fact, write entirely new stories with new characters and have them all with a deep symbolic meaning every single day. That, and I always do shit like this to myself. I attempt to do things I know for a fact I can't do but it's like what-the-fuck-ever, I'm doing it anyway! And I don't realize my mistake until waaay later.

But what is to become of this blog? Hmm, well, I haven't stopped writing by any means; it's still my favorite thing to do. I will post short stories on here if they can be read in a short sitting and I feel they are plenty good enough at the small length they will be. This blog will not be updated daily. Probably only updated once in a blue moon. But hopefully what you see will be good enough to read multiple times over and still get the same emotional effect each time. Hopefully.

Until the first story,
-Casey Cannon, hack writer.