Experimental Writing

I’m trying to see if this is my writing place and time.

Obviously I did not drink enough tonight. My professor, the lapsed Jesuit Priest, who gave up organized religion for a stab at screenwriting, said that I’ve got to find my writing place and time. While at numerous bars tonight, we chatted about whether or not we’d changed since high school. Someone concluded that the drinking age is 21 so that with dignity you can edge off the fact that you haven’t accomplished at 21 what you thought you would’ve accomplished when you were 16-going-on-21. I like to think I have changed since high school; Rachel told me that I am more optimistic. I only hesitated to consider the potential poem I might construct after dropping a nickel in a parking meter to purchase 120 seconds. I wonder what it would be like to give up priesthood to teach a creative writing class at a mediocre university? Maybe not as bad as receiving a text message from Annie stating that she couldn’t make it to my birthday party because she had to eat reheated Popeye’s chicken with her future mother-in-law. I walked out of that screenwriting class already certain that I would drop. There was a pale kid in the front row who kept interrupting Father to talk about the film noir and horror films he was writing. I could tell that he hadn’t seen sunlight in years. I didn’t want to chance being paired with him as a workshop buddy. I’ve done my time with the creative types.

Down the coast in three days: Seattle to Phoenix
“Leanne sigh some more,

Use that air to push us through

Frisbee and Palm Springs”
-H.

3. L.

Hey yellow Corvette—

Hey, you drive like an asshole

Right lane, bitch, right lane

5. L.

Aviator shades

Sinister monkey eyebrows

Sticky forehead bangs

8. L.

Oh wow oh wow oh

my god oh my god oh my

this is great oh wow

13. L. (Skittles)

Feed me a little

Bit of the rainbow, oh yeah

Place it in my mouf

15. L.

How, asked the wise owl,

Many licks will it take to

Finish this haiku?

18. L.

It is too early

To write a decent haiku

Road trip hangover

19. L.

Smog-masked mountain views

The ants keep marching—hoorah—

Bumper by bumper

21. L.

no inspiration

in the City of Angels

the rush hour commute

23. L.

Velvet hotel walls,

Fiona A’s paper bag

holds forty ounces

24. L.

Hank! Welcome to the

Optimist’s Club! Do you take

Your whiskey half-full?

A staple of a good liberal arts education

While standing in a supermarket checkout lane trying to silence your roaring stomach after a foodless ten hours spent at a mindless job, rather than murdering the screaming baby and its mother on her cell phone, you will clutch the disease-caked handle of your shopping cart—the one with the squeaky left wheel—and inhale the situation with a sprinkle of humanity. Whereas the asshole who practically runs you over with his SUV in the parking lot, the one who is clearly not an English major, will not. He also won’t be able to interpret the scene in a series on run-on sentences, pretentiously linked with semicolons; nor will he be able to guzzle adjectives with the same reverence that he guzzles gas. And when you look at it that way, the money and time you spent on your degree has really paid off.