itesser ink: progress, uncensored

Honestly, how does Brian Kiteley expect me to tell a satisfying story in 700 words? (Which raises the question if any of my 3am exercises have really produced satisfying results, but we'll leave that to one side for now.)

Confession: I haven't written 700, or even 600 words for this "Journalism" exercise. Currently it clocks in at 575, but I'm only about 60% done with the arc.

Today's premise is to write part of a story in the form of journal entries. It's possible I'm doing it wrong again. First off, this isn't "part" of a story (which may be a clue as to where I'm going wrong and trampling the suggested word counts), but the other "wrong" bits come from the extended prompt, which I'm not going to write out or enumerate. Trust me. I'm doing it wrong.

In any case, I'm basing this story on this sketch by Stephen Gardner.

Stripped

Friday, March 5
The rain is coming down so hard today I think God has folded the world in half and the Atlantic is spilling down on us. Stopping it from drenching you is futile. Even if newspapers were a nickel again, it wouldn't be worth it to hold one overhead; you'd be covered with inky pulp. I suppose an umbrella could've protected me from the downpour, but I still haven't replaced the one I left on the subway last month.

All this to say every sane person had their head down and hurried from place to place. I did. But that didn't prevent me from seeing a motor bike chained to a parking sign between the subway and my bus. It's only three blocks, how many strange things can happen in three blocks? But in just the past week it's been an old, smashed phone booth, a woman in a cooked turkey costume, and now a motor bike chained to a parking sign.

Monday, March 8
The motor bike is still there. I checked, it's a motor bike, not a motorcycle. I don't know where anyone would ride one of those in the city; I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to, anyway.

My neighbor suggested that maybe it's not still there, just there again. It was parked at the same angle both days, a weekend apart, but maybe he's right.


Tuesday, March 9
I chalked the bike today. Just curiosity, like that which swept over the face of that lady leaning out the window across the street. What was I doing crouching by this silent bike and examining its tires?

What was she doing in a business suit with her hair in rollers at four-thirty in the afternoon?!

Friday, March 12
Still there, and the mark hasn't moved all week. I did a little research about the bike yesterday, mostly on youtube. Now the machine on the sidewalk looks like a caged bird in my eyes, caged in a land far from home. Picture a peacock in an antartic lab, or a hawk. (The hawk is in the antarctic lab, too, because it seems like raptors exist pretty much everywhere. Except Antarctica.)

It's an injustice for a bike like that KTM to be somewhere so flat and paved as this city. I guess that's why it's chained, otherwise it'd go brrroooooOOOoooming off towards the thuway and the backwoods upstate.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle was a great book. I hope kids are still reading it.


Monday, March 15
Ralph lost his tail over the weekend. After cooping myself up in the apartment all weekend, trying to bang out a new song for Go-Nowhere Band Part 67, I got up early today. Setting my alarm 40 minutes early let me toss my morning routine out the window and take a new route to work, a route that would jog me past the motorbike before work, instead of just after it.

Quite a jog it was. I had to cross to the wrong side of the street to go past it, and when I bent to check the chalk mark (still there, same spot), the whole muffler apparatus was missing! I think. My obsession is just romantic and poetic, I haven't gotten into anatomy lessons.

Where once shiny (though scuffed) pipes swept out of the bike, there's just a dull emptiness and the backsides of some other... pipes.

The delay, both double-crossing the street and checking Ralph's the bike's cavity, threw off my timing and I had to run to catch my train. That's where the jog comes in.

Find part 2 of this story here


Top thing I like about this format: I feel liberated from descriptions. While I love finding the right handful of words for details, writing a journal in someone else's voice pushes me to describe less, just as I describe few things about my daily surroundings in my own journal.

Top thing I dislike about this format: When working in a format I'm accustomed to being autobiographical in (and garbling the English language in), it's difficult to write in a voice other than my own. I found myself falling into Annie's verbal patterns instead of finding Narrator-Girl's patterns. Maybe I'm fretting too much about this detail of a daily writing warm-up.

Moment of joy.: I have a bookmark folder called "write about", and the sketch I based this writing on was in that folder. This is the first time I've actually gone back to that folder of things that inspire me to make use of them. Minor victory!

Despite the cluster of sub-minor failings while I was plating dinner, today was mostly small victories, along the lines of getting chores done around the house, getting things organized. Making lists, and cooking a delicious dinner.

Tomorrow will have both more hours and fewer chores, so we're predicting high productivity. I, especially, hope some of those hours will have photography in them, because this post is pretty text-heavy.

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Post-script footnote to say "good things" about Stephen Gardner's work in general. He makes nice sketches, even when not drawing [[*spoiler alert*]] dismembered motorcycles.