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Here be the promo I was talking about for the last couple of weeks. Listen to it for all the details, one to post tomorrow as well. And probably the day after that, and the one after that two. Got to get all these things out thank to my nemesis and his delay in getting me the lines.
This one is a bit late. There was some celebration, some procrastination and a wee bit of depression that kept me from getting any real work done over the weekend. If you’re following me on Twitter you’ll see that I got some writing done on Saturday before I headed out to the bar. So far I’m up to 24,499 words on M.E.R.C. I’ve fallen into the habit of getting stuff done around the house and watching movies in the afternoon and sitting down to write at night after I bring my mom home from work. And each night I kick out anywhere between 2k and 5k words. I imagine I could make immense progress if I devoted whole days to writing. I’d probably already be done by now if I did that. But I fear I’d also have burnt out on the story by now. I’m making pretty good progress on the story. I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be on my writing process. My outline was just a series of bullet points in the directions that I wanted to take the story, but Marcus is making his own path. I sat down on November first with plans to tell the story of a soldier who was experimented on and eventually lied to and used by the men that gave him orders. I had every intentions of following my outline to the letter, but then I realized that before I could tell the story of why Marcus grew to resent his commanding officers I needed to tell the story of him as a person. I can write about how he abhors the orders he’s given, but it won’t make a lot of sense if I don’t first explain why he abhors them. I sit down to write every night and I say to myself,
“Okay, vacation time is over for my protagonist. It’s time for him to get his orders and go kill some people.”
And then that night of writing turns into more of what Marcus is doing on his leisure time. Lines upon lines of dialogue between him and the characters he’s making connections with that makes his rebellion that much more meaningful. I’m not sure why this is happening. Maybe Marcus has more of a story to tell than I do. Maybe he’s not letting me write him in on his missions yet because he’s not ready to leave his ratty apartment in Norfolk. Maybe he’s not done spending time with the only person he’s made a connection with since he lost his squad mates. The only person he’s said more than two words two that wasn’t a fellow soldier.
Maybe I’m just stalling, things are ramping up towards act two of my story where we get back into the action. I’ve never made this much progress on a story before. I’ve always gotten near the end of the first act and burnt out, maybe I don’t know how to carry on a story from this point? Maybe I’m continuing to write about the boring daily life of a biometrically augmented soldier because I’m not sure if I can succeed in progressing the story past where it already is. Maybe I’ll pass the 50k finish line and Marcus will still be sitting in his apartment watching ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. I’m not sure, but there is one thing that I am sure of.
NaNoWriMo isn’t about procrastination. NaNoWriMo isn’t about fears. NaNoWriMo is about finishing your story and then dragging it out of your hard drive and out into the world, kicking and screaming if need be.
I’m sure there are a lot of writers out there who are feeling the same things that are crossing my mind now. You’ve reached the halfway mark and you feel like you’re not done. You feel as if you’re not ready to take that next leap that carries your story into the climax and sends it soaring into a conclusion, or a cliff hanger for those of you who are writing your first part of a series. If you’re in those shoes know that I’m wearing them too. I’ve got them laced up and they’re all scuffed up with worn soles from all the times I’ve gotten to this precipice and turned back because I was afraid of what would be on the other side of this halfway point. So when you sit down to belt out a few more words on your story at some point today, know that I’m right there in the trenches with all of you hammering out prose and increasing my word count.
We’re all in this together folks, keep your morale and your WPM’s up. We can do this.
Well, boys and girls, we’ve made it through week one of NaNo. As far as I know we’re all still alive. One of my friends had some trouble with her laptop and lost some work but she didn’t get discouraged. I haven’t hit any walls with writers block, burn out, or procrastination. Surprisingly enough I’m still able to carry on a social life while working on this novel. I guess I underestimated myself and how productive I could be by just writing three or four hours out of the day. My word count after week one is 17,353. I haven’t done any writing over the weekend. I can’t really remember what I spent this weekend doing but I know that most of it was productive in some way or another.
If you haven’t already noticed the word count widgets on the NaNo site started working this week so you can use that to track my progress now. It can be found on the side bar to the right near the bottom of the page. I selected the word count widget for a very good reason. I thought that that reason would have been explained in the form of an audio promo by now, but sadly, my nemesis hasn’t finished putting together the promo yet.
Long story short I find that I have a hard time sticking to writing deadlines unless I have myself motivated. So to make NaNo for this year a little bit more interesting, Scott Roche and I have a little wager going. Whichever out of the two of us have the highest word count by Saturday 10 PM EST each week wins. The winner gets to make the loser do whatever he wants.
You can keep track of all this using the widget in the side bar and audio promos that will be released during the weeks to come. I’ll link the first promo here when it’s released.
That’s all I’ve got to say for now. We’re all in this together, kids. Lets try to keep each other motivated and I hope to see you crossing that 50,000 word finish line with me at midnight on the thirtieth. Hang in there.
NaNoWriMo has officially kicked off. For a majority of today I thought that I’d have to postpone my writing. My goals for last month was the creation story for Great Hites, My essay, a few short stories, my novel outline, fixing a neighbors computer, and recording a promo for my show. I accomplished all of those goals except for the creation myth, the promo, and fixing the computer. I didn’t really find a whole lot of time to write the creation myth with all of the other projects that I had going. I have all the lines I need for the promo except for the one line from Kyle, and I would have had my neighbors computer fixed were it not from some hard drive issues.
Now I have a promo for the show to finish this month, I’ll spend tomorrow fixing the computer, and I have something to record for something I’ll discuss near the end of this post.
I made time after dinner for writing. I sat down for about an hour and with the help of techno I cranked out 1,995 words. If you’d like to keep track of my NaNo Progress my page can be found here. At least until the writing widget thingies start working, they you will be able to track my progress in the sidebar to the right. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year I encourage you to add me as a Writing buddy. You might feel the urge to top my word count and that will keep you motivated through the month of November.
What’s keeping me motivated for this year is the rivalry I’ve set up with my nemesis. Keep your eyes posted on my show blog for more information about that in the form of an audio promo.
Also if you’d like to read what I’m working on I’ve added a two chapter excerpt on my profile on the NaNo site.
Another interesting piece of shameless self promotion is that this weeks episode of BOaC. The feature for this week I chose to talk about NaNoWriMo and had Scott sit in on the feature with me and we discussed some domestic things that can get in your way during the month of November. The distractions that the internet poses, as well as some of the issues you face as a novice writer. And after each one of these pitfalls we describe ways to get around them so that you can achieve success this month. It can be found here.
We can do this people, lets keep ourselves and each other motivated. And, Scott, I will destroy you.
If you do not wish to read through the whole essay now, you may download the .PDF format of this work at the bottom of the post. If you choose to listen to it instead the audio version can be found on the show blog for my podcast.
When I first started doing research for this essay, I wasn’t sure where I would stand on this subject. And now that I’m sitting down to write it I still haven’t reached a decision. Hopefully in writing it I’ll be able to make up my mind, or at the very least, help you decide where you stand with the information that I provide. The topic of this essay was inspired by a discussion between two characters in Dan Sawyers, “Down From Ten”. Upon hearing of this I felt compelled to do some research on the subject. After a few days of Googling I have come up with quite a bit.
NASA requests billions of dollars every year in funding to do various forms of research, ranging from more advanced global positioning and mapping systems to space exploration, even climate control. According to NASA’s most recent, “NASA FY 2010 Budget Summary Update”, NASA has requested $18.686 billion for the year of 2010. Though this may seem like a lot of money to be asking for, but NASA’s projects can get very expensive. For example it cost NASA over $20 million to build the Spitzer Space Telescope. The sole purpose of this telescope is to fly it into a black hole in the center of the galaxy just to see what will happen. But it’s not as if they squander the money they get for funding. They made several discoveries and ground breaking progress in their projects just this year alone, which will be discussed in later paragraphs.
As stated in the previous paragraph NASA has requested $18.686 billion for their funding for the year of 2010. Just to show you that they’re not squandering the money on ways to build a cooler paper airplane. Here is some of the progress they have made in 2009 alone. Water ice has been discovered on Mars, which could mean that Mars has either at one point in time sustained life, or, it represents the possibility for the red planet to sustain life. The Cassini spacecraft is providing valuable information and stunning photographs of Saturn and it’s moons. Nineteen fly-bys of Titan provided enough information to create a 3D topographic map of the terrain of the moon, revealing mountains, polar lakes, vast dunes, and flows from possible ice volcanoes. And that’s just some of the progress that they’ve made as stated in their 2010 budget summary update.
At this point some readers of this essay are probably thinking, “Sure, they’re doing nifty things with rocket ships and satellites. But what does this have to do with us as a people?” Well, if we advance our space program, we can outlive our sun. In almost every Sci-Fi television program and film, and even in science class, they tell you that one day our sun is going to expand to the point to where it will engulf the Earth. That’s game over for the planet. In theory, if we haven’t made drastic adjustments to out space program, that’s game over for the human race as well. With all of the progress that NASA makes on the space program it is very possible that one day we’ll be able to experience life among the stars. We will outlive our own planet and our sun. We’ll be able to make other planets habitable. Or, if we don’t have the resources it would take to terraform whole planets, we might make large space stations orbiting our sun, or the suns of other star systems.
Earlier I mentioned the Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s sole purpose was for NASA to fly it into the black hole at the center of our galaxy just to see what will happen. NASA will have the telescope sending picture and video information on it’s way through the black hole. The Spitzer will either be compressed into a singularity or it could emerge through the other side at a completely different place in the universe, thus proving the theory of worm holes. And if we’ll be able to travel great distances across space via worm holes, how far off could we be from FTL (Faster-than-light) travel? With an advanced space program the possibilities are endless.
And for those of you who are skeptic towards future advancements and make your judgments solely on what has already put in front of you NASA has made many products that you may or may not use in every day life that were once intended for NASA space missions. Some of these products include: Tang, Velcro, cordless tools, TV satellite dishes, the microwave oven, smoke detectors, medical imaging equipment, edible toothpaste, and invisible braces. This is only a small list of technological advancements created by our space program benefiting the average citizen and the list grows every year. Imagine items that will be in your medicine cabinet, on your kitchen counter, in your tool box, or in our hospitals in a years time. Imagine what will be available to the public in ten years time that was once on a NASA spacecraft.
However, one must also think about the third world countries in the world that either don’t have clean water, or have to walk miles every day to a community pump just to have enough water to cook and drink on a daily basis. Places like Bangladesh, parts of South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Some areas outside of major cities, not to mention entire countries. By contrast have water that is either partially contaminated or altogether undrinkable. They have to rely on foreign aid for their clean water, or walk to community pumps miles away from their homes. When both these options are unavailable some people just take their chances with the water that’s available, while developed countries use less than five per cent of their water supply for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.
But how can we put all of this money into research to get us into space, a process which will possibly take several generations to make any major progress, when there are millions of people who are dying from hunger and thirst in third world countries? In the countries where clean water is scarce the people have to rely on foreign aid. Many of the people of these countries that don’t have clean water readily available have to walk over two kilometers every day to a community water pump to collect twenty to twenty-five liters of water and return to their village. In most places it’s the women in the family that gather the water, this makes a total of over 4 kilometers and almost 30 liters of water per trip, per day. And when there is no foreign aid and no community water pumps available these people have to result to fossil ground water, reusing wastewater or to desalinate their sea water. These methods can prove to either be bad for the environment, or detrimental to the health of citizens. And in the countries where people choose to take their chances with contaminated water sources many forms of waterborne diseases and illnesses take place. Things like parasites, cholera, and diarrhea.
To put this into perspective, 50 million people in middle eastern and Arab countries do not have clean water. Over half the people in rural Morocco do not have clean water. 1.1 billion people worldwide lack safe drinking water, 2.6 billion lack proper sanitation, and and 1.8 million die every year die from contaminated water, over ninety per cent of these people are under 5 years of age. How much would the living conditions of these countries improve if we spent just a fraction of the money that goes into NASA funding went into clean water programs for third world countries? Yes, massive advancements and improvements could be made to technology and our own livelihood if we advance our space programs. But it could take several years to see any kind of feasible return on this program. Whereas providing clean water for less well to do countries sees an almost immediate return. Again, to put it into perspective once more. Every dollar invested into a clean water program would yield $3 to $34 dollars of funding for a clean water program depending on the region, and at least $7.3 million dollars would be saved in medical costs every year in countries where the people are plagued by waterborne afflictions.
But there are also some negative aspects in improving our space program as well as helping third world countries have clean drinking water. If we spend billions of dollars every year to advance our space program we’ll be constantly one-upping other countries with space programs like Russia, and China. I’m sure that the great space race to put a man on the moon created plenty of animosity between America and Russia. And given the war-like nature of any society, who’s to say that dumping all this money into funding our space program won’t result in creating more advanced satellites that are armed with missiles instead of information gathering devices? All it takes is a country with one too many orbital defense systems pointed at a crazy leader to move the hands of the doomsday clock a little bit closer to midnight.
You also have to take into effect the intentions of the leaders of the countries that don’t have clean drinking water. Many of these countries are constantly at war with neighboring countries, or locked in civil wars. Many of these countries are run by vindictive dictators, holy men with nothing on their mind but a religious agenda, or psychotic tribe leaders. So who’s to say that things will only get better if we step in to help. It’s been shown many times that after a country offers foreign aid of some kind that the dictators will step in, hoard all the foreign aid for themselves, or sell it on the world market or black market and leave their people to suffer. And sometimes a country can become flooded with foreign aid, and with an overabundance of aid farmers are unable to make money selling their crops and inevitably lose their land to the dictators who confiscate their property to expand his own territory.
There is plenty of information available on this topic to fuel many a debate. But if we’ve gathered anything from this essay thus far, it’s that there are many pitfalls on either side of this argument. But, in closing, my own personal opinion on the matter is that before we can reach for the stars, we need to provide for our fellow man and be united as a people, and as a planet in order to succeed.
Exploration vs Dehydration by Eldon KR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Sources
NASA FY 2010 Budget Request Summary
344612main_Agency_Summary_Final_updates_5_6_09_R2.pdf (application/pdf Object)The Space Place: Inventions from space
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spinoffs2.shtmlYale Global Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/choking-aid-money-africaWater Supply & Sanitation
http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/index.php?id=23World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2004/pr58/en/index.htmlWikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_waterCreative Loafing News & Views
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/why_was_cyclone_nargis_so_deadly_/Content?oid=486678
Audio available here.
I finished writing my essay a couple of days ago. It’s been given the main title of, “Exploration vs Dehydration”. I sent off the rough draft to Scott Roche, author of the Archangel Novel(s), for first draft edits. I got those edits back today, made all appropriate edits and then sent them off to my cousin for an extra set of eyes on the second draft. Once the edits, if any, come back from my cousin it will be ready for viewing. Upon it’s release it will be available on this blog, it will also be available in .PDF format for those of you who would rather read it that way. And for those of you who would rather listen to it than read it, I’ll have it available in audio form as bonus content on my show blog.
That’s really all that I’ve been working on so far this month, I’ve done a little bit of research for my NaNo project, and I’ve done nothing for research for this month’s GH prompt. And I might delay my work on that for a bit while I work on an interesting short story prompt from News From Poughkeepsie. Work on that should only take a day max, so I’ll be back to researching and writing that GH prompt soon.
I’m not really sure how much more productive I’ll remain due to the fact that my glasses are broken now. It’s true that I have relatively good eyesiight, but spending most of my day in front of a computer screen gives me massive eyestrain. I use reading glasses to combat this. Just recently, however, the earpiece fell off of my reading glasses and I can’t repair them as they’re plastic and one of the parts that held the screw in place snapped off. So if I wish to use my glasses I have ot hold them in place and they sit on my face at an odd angle, making them quite cumbersome to use. Hopefully I can replace them soon before the eyestrain renders me unable to work.
Reading glasses are very expensive but I’ve come across some problems this month that I believe take precedence over the glasses. I need to change the oil in my car, and that hasn’t been done in over a year and it’s starting to concern me now. Also the weather is getting colder here in Indiana and most of my winter clothes from last year either no longer fit me due to weight loss, are no longer in any wearable condition, or have dissapeared. And with my car no longer having a heater I need to acquire materials that will allow me to bundle up.
That’s about as far as writerly updates go, I didn’t really mean to get all personal, and whiny, on you. But sometimes that is what an update entails. And since I try to keep the majority of my personal life from flavoring this blog, I feel that the occasional insight couldn’t hurt.
You can stay tuned to this blog for more updates on my writing progress over the next couple of months, or you could also follow me on Twitter.
That’s really all that I have to say, I’ve been drinking tonight and it’s starting to get to me, and I’m drawing a blank, so I’ll see you next time.
It’s been a few days since my last update and I figured I’d throw another update on the blog so you know what I’m up to. Hopefully I’ll get into the habit of blogging on this thing a lot more.
Everyday this week so far I’ve gotten into the habit of getting up around seven or eight in the morning for many reasons. One of these reasons, as I’ve learned from my cousin, is that he more regular your sleep schedule is the more dopamine your body produces. This makes you feel better about yourself and makes you more productive. Or at least I think that’s what it means. My cousin was always better with the sciency stuff.
The other reason is that I find when I get up early I’m in more of a productive mood, I check news blogs and do research for the show and other things so I’ve been getting a lot more writerly work done, and more podcaster work done in a couple of days than I do all week.
And to keep me from staying up late, I walk a mile or two a night to keep myself in shape and to expend some excess energy so that I’m ready for bed when my head hits the pillow.
So as far as my productivity for today, I wrote the outline for my essay. The alt-title for the essay will be, “Reaching for the stars while other people starve” or something along those lines. It’s a work in progress and I don’t have a main title yet. I’m open to suggestions. I also caught up on all the blogs in my RSS reader and I also filled out most of the show notes for next week.
Also, since it’s October now, Kyle seems to be showing an interest in the show again which means that he may very well be present for next weeks episode as long as we can get any scheduling conflicts worked out. He seems to want to record over the weekend. I like to get the recording done Wednesday through Friday so that I have the weekend to edit it, have Ben transcribe the show notes and get it uploaded. Which is almost impossible to do by the midnight deadline if we record on a Saturday or Sunday.
Like I said, I wrote the outline for my essay today, I’ll probably work on writing it tomorrow. Depending on how I feel, what other projects I decide to work on tomorrow, and what distractions get in the way of the writing process; I’ll either write the whole thing tomorrow and do the bibliography at a later date, or divide the 4 sections and the bibliography up into different days and have it all done sometime next week. Since I gave myself all of October to work on it I’m not in much of a rush.
As far as other writing projects go I ordered a Koran (or however it’s spelled, Firefox isn’t correcting my spelling and I’ve seen it spelled many ways) online and when it arrives at the house I’ll read through it, and a bible, and whatever else I have handy as research for Octobers GH prompt, creation myths and all.
I haven’t really done a lot of research on my project for NaNoWriMo but I’ve got irons in the fire. My father is sending me some of my grandfathers old military training manuals, and I’ve asked one of my friends to loan me any he has because they’d be more recent. All that would be left was to research bio and nano-tech.
Thats about all I have in the way of writerly updates for you today, but might I mention that now that I’m back on the writing wagon I’m Twittering constantly. So if you’d like to see what I’m up to in real time, feel free to follow me on Twitter. If I can discern if you’re a real person I just might follow you back. Just don’t try to sell me anything. And I’ll see what I can do about adding a twitter widget to the side bar of the blog.
Well, as you can see if you’ve been watching the show blog that season three is up and running again. Four episodes are up already for your listening pleasure and another one will drop next Monday like always. And as the show goes on I’m becoming more interested in varying topics and I feel that I’ll have a lot to talk about until the season ends in either November or December. I still haven’t decided when I want to bring the season to a close.
But enough about the show. This is technically my writer blog, so I might as well entertain you with my writerly pursuits.
I haven’t put any work in to the Great Hites writing prompts for a while. I kind of got sucked into WoW for a while and didn’t do much else but level my hunter and find fotune in the auction house.
I plan on participating in this month’s prompt. That’s right boys and girls, it’s not a weekly prompt this time it’s the whole month of October. The prompt is something along the lines of creating your own creation myth. I’ll mull some ideas over in my head and see what I can do with it. One of the things I like about the GH prompts is that they’re usually never in my writing comfort zone. The prompts have always been about something I’d never written before.
Also, this entire month is going to be spent doing research for two projects. The first one is going to be research for my writing project for November’s NaNoWriMo. I’m going to write a novel based on an idea that I’ve been playing with in my head for over a year now. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s going to be about a mercenary with bio-tech implants to make him a more efficient soldier. With that said I need to do a lot of research on the military as well as bio-tech so that I didn’t get anything wrong. I’m going to write it for NaNo, and after that I’m going to submit the story to some beta readers, edit it, and then I’ll most likely podcast it.
I know that I’ve said before that I wanted, “Checking In” to be the first thing that I podcasted as fiction, but I’m nowhere near finished on that. I think I’ve only put about four or five chapters worth of work into it since I last gave an update about it on the blog. I’m going to put that on the back burner for a while and crack open some bibles as well as a few other religions works either fictional or non fictional as well as some books from other religions as well and see if I can expand my horizons on this novel a bit. So, while that one is on the back burner I’m going to be working on my NaNo project for November and then getting it ready to podcast, so that I can get my fiction podcasting feet wet.
The second thing I’m going to be doing research for is an essay. I haven’t written very many essays but I’ve always intended on it. There’s ways that you can express your opinions and concerns on certain matters in a well researched essay than you can in a blog post. So I’ll be doing research on an essay that will be written somewhere along the lines of all the funding that NASA gets every years to put us in the stars against all the countries in the world that don’t even have clean drinking water, let alone a space program. I’ll be doing research on that and see if I can get that cranked out by the end of October.
I plan on posting the essay here in text form as well as download-able PDF format. And if I’m feeling up to it I might record it in audio form as well and dorp that on the BOaC feed as bonus content for my listeners over there that don’t visit that blog.
And it will inspire those of you that visit this blog and not the show blog in case you’d rather have the essay read to you instead of having to wade through lines of text. I plan to do a lot of writing and research this month and I plan to keep you updated.
Listen to the audio. It’s self explanatory.
Once more this is a posting of one of my short stories that requires a pretext. I submitted the story as it is and it was rejected for content. So I submitted an edited version to The Great Hites Podcast The unedited version is being run here on this blog.
If you don’t want to read through the story you can figure out why any audio I record refuses to work on wordpress. Once you figure that out I’ll be able to post the audio recording of the story for you to listen to instead of having to read it. Until then you’re going to have to read it.
A Dog With Dry Skin
a short story written by Eldon KR
I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming. In all honesty I should have, and I normally would have. But I had been with her for so long that I really didn’t expect any of this. I had an addon for Firefox that would always reload the tabs that were last viewed when the browser was launched again. Occasionally I’d see things like price checks on plane tickets, rental cars, things like that. I never really thought anything of it. She told me she was leaving me in November. I was blindsided. Everything seemed like we were doing great. She didn’t actually end up leaving to go back to Texas until the second week of December.
The goodbye sex we had before I had to take her to the airport was more an act of pity on her part, I think. I mean, when two years of your life is getting back on a plane for home because she didn’t know what she wanted out of her life, you’re not exactly a stud in the sack are you? But I knew that she was leaving for a month before she actually did, so there was plenty of time for the “I’m never going to see you again” fornication. Except for the fact that for most of this time she led me to believe that I could fix whatever was wrong and that she’d be back. There was also the “I can’t believe you’ve done this to me I wish you were dead” hate sex after I found out that she’d been using my bed, and my car to cheat on me with some guy I knew down the road for that month she was getting ready to leave. The guy that I’d known since the first day I moved up here, the guy I went on odd jobs with in the summer.
Every time I was out in Indy to see my friend, or in class, or somewhere around town they were in my bed. Every time I was at home, she had to go get cigarettes. Or she just felt like going for a drive, or to Walmart. There was even one time when he was at the house and she said she had to take him over to Eric’s house to do some work. At ten o’clock at night. Yeah, the guy who had me spend most of the summer painting his garage and doing work on his house, let the kid use his spare bedroom as a bachelor pad because I was at the house. And she didn’t feel the need to tell me any of this was going on until she thought that she caught something.
I’d like to take this time to reiterate that I should have been able to put all the pieces together. And I know what you’re thinking, if she had already broken up with me why did it matter? Well, it mattered to me because I was led to believe that she’d come back, and that she needed a break, and her sister was about to have a baby and she needed to be there. Oh shut up, it was a really hard time for me and I was going to hold onto any small glimmer of hope that I could like a drowning man to an inner tube. Anyway, it mattered to me because this whole time this was going on, she was being sneaky about it. We were still sharing a room, and a bed. We were still sleeping together. Sometimes she still told me she loved me. I felt wronged.
I played Celldweller on the way to the airport in Indianapolis. It was a band I’d discovered that she actually liked. And the soundtrack would provide no awkward small talk, and no awkward silences. I dropped her off at the airport. She kissed me and told me she loved me. She said if I could find work and get the money that I could fly to Texas to kidnap her and bring her back to Indiana. All I could do was hold back my tears and tell her that I loved her too. It wasn’t until I got back on the highway that I started crying, and screaming, and punching my steering wheel.
My friend in Indy knew this would be a tough time for me and said I could hang out with him and his wife for a few days and we could get drunk, talk about zombies, and play video games. I’ve never been too terribly good with directions in a place I’m not at often. I find one easy to memorize route to get to some place and I stick to that route. If there was another place I needed to learn how to get to in Indianapolis it was usually just a different variation on that one route that I’d have to memorize. So it didn’t take me long to get lost trying to get to his house on the way back from the airport. That and it’s really easy to miss an exit on the highway at night when you’re crying. I’m not down with all the macho manly man crap. If I’m hurting on an emotional level then dammit, I’m going to cry.
Moving on, I called my friend told him I was lost. He gave me directions to get to his work from where I was because it was easy to get to his house from where he worked. Well, yet again I made a wrong turn and got all turned around and lost again. So he told me to pull off the road and wait for him in the parking lot of a near by White Castle until he got off work. I was sitting in this parking lot for about four maybe five hours. To keep myself awake to decrease my chances of being robbed I spent that time listening to the first book of the Archangel podcast. The sun was starting to come up and I saw. my friends car enter the parking lot and he engaged in an impromptu game of bumper tag to make sure I was awake before he parked his car. We sat in the restaurant and he ate while I talked. I followed him back to his house, got some sleep, and we spent the next few days pickling our livers and playing Gears of War, good therapy in my book.
The next week of December rolled by and I still wasn’t used to sleeping alone. It was the week of Christmas, my grandmother got me a membership to The Smithsonian, still not sure what privileges that entitles me to, but the magazine is pretty good. Christmas day came around, I say day and not morning because nobody wakes up before noon at this house without a legitimate need to. I walked into the living room and there was a cardboard box on the floor. I asked my mom what was in it, she tells me to lift up the box and see what was under it.
As I approached the box I heard a muffled bark from beneath the cardboard. Excited I lifted up the box and was shocked at what I saw. My mother had gotten me one of those robot dogs that you’d find in the toy aisle at Walmart. I was slightly annoyed by this, as it appeared to be a gag. I’d gotten a robot dog, instead of an actual puppy. I’d wanted one since I moved up here and I was finally living in a place that had a yard, instead of an apartment, or a dorm, or in a car. I went along with it anyway seeing as it was Christmas, and a gag gift was better than no gift at all. I didn’t get used to sleeping alone, and having a whole bed to myself until recently. Yeah, I had to brave through the cold winter nights alone. But now I had a dog with dry skin to keep me company.
A Dog With Dry Skin by Eldon KR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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