At Big Other, Amber Sparks has a review of Museum of the Weird that I really like because it’s got a good insight that I haven’t seen anyone have yet into how all the characters have a hard time existing. I like thinking about that as I round the bend on this novel. Thank you, Amber.
There is appliance delivery truck outside my window with its ramp down. At the base of the ramp is a cardboard box the size of a dishwasher. Five feet away, in the road, there is a dishwasher lying door-side-up. It looks like the dishwasher tried to escape and fell on its back. I took a picture of it but now that I’ve described it I feel I don’t need to post the picture. A picture might ruin it. Maybe just imagine it, you know?
Yesterday I guest-taught my friend Jack’s high school creative writing class. I don’t teach anymore so I went all out. I said it was time to rap real about creative writing. I showed them one of my favorite Kathy Fish stories. I addressed them as Birds and Dear Students and Dear Birds. One of the girls said that her mother calls her Dove. We did a writing exercise where they picked five words and we were to write about them. They picked basket, funny, dragon, pretentious, hand, bonus word love, and extra bonus title word, unique. They wrote cool stories. I wrote a funny little one:
The man’s hand was resting on the railroad track. It looked like he was gripping the wooden supports between the rails, but the remainder of his body was nowhere to be found. It looked funny to Suzanne, who had never felt love for the man but missed him now that only his hand remained. She picked it up and placed it in her basket. She decided on giving it as a gift to the museum curator she was going on a date with later that night. He was pretentious, and carried a pocket guide referencing dragon sightings in mythological culture, and she did not love him either, but she would try.
I called mine “nothing unique in the world” because the title had to have the word “unique” in it. Their stories were all different — which seems obvious but it notable because the last time I did this exercise with the same age group, many strange elements of their stories were the same, images of fenceposts, for example, unrelated to prompt — and some were about dragons and some were conversations people were having, or titles, and one was about a girl who meets an angel of death. I liked hearing their stories. We talked about how some words are heavy and some words are light, and how it’s fun to make the light words heavy and the heavy words light.
I put water on to boil and added salt to the pot. When the water boiled, I added spaghetti and set the timer for ten minutes. Some people don’t time pasta and I think that’s a fool’s move. After seven minutes, I put olive oil in a small pan and set it on low. I cut three pieces of garlic into thin slices and dropped it in the pan. I let them cook for a minute, then cracked two eggs over and covered the pan. By then, the pasta was done and I poured it into the strainer and then into a bowl. The whites on the eggs were almost set and I turned off the burner and put the eggs on top of the pasta. I mixed it all up and sprinkled salt and pepper on top. The days go by, don’t they?
