Care to play??
Categories
Archives
-
-
-
-
Recent Posts
- Frankenstein coming to life …
- “I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless.” — Thom Yorke
- Frankenstein and Tiffany, part deux
- “I want to live, not pose!” — Carole Lombard
- “When I’m performing, that’s the real me.” — Billy Lee Riley
- “If someone spends his life writing the truth without caring for the consequences, he inevitably becomes a political authority in a totalitarian regime.” — Václav Havel
- “[At Swim-Two-Birds is] just the book to give to your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.” – Dylan Thomas on Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece
- “All my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, `Look at the poor dope, wilya?” — Buster Keaton
- “That cat was royalty, man.” — Mick Jagger on Eddie Cochran
- “The problem with taking amps to a shop is that they come back sounding like another amp.” — Stevie Ray Vaughan
Recent Comments
- sheila on “When I’m performing, that’s the real me.” — Billy Lee Riley
- sheila on “When I’m performing, that’s the real me.” — Billy Lee Riley
- Krsten Westergaard on “When I’m performing, that’s the real me.” — Billy Lee Riley
- sheila on Premiere of Frankenstein official trailer!
- sheila on Premiere of Frankenstein official trailer!
- Sheila Welch on Premiere of Frankenstein official trailer!
- sheila on “I wish I had not been so reserved.” — Joseph Cornell’s final words
- Jack Sakes on “I wish I had not been so reserved.” — Joseph Cornell’s final words
- sheila on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
- Todd Restler on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
- sheila on “Teens always heard my music with their hearts. The beat was just happy. It didn’t have color or hidden meaning.” — Fats Domino
- sheila on “Teens always heard my music with their hearts. The beat was just happy. It didn’t have color or hidden meaning.” — Fats Domino
- sheila on If the Hollywood Reporter says it…
- Nathalie Latour on If the Hollywood Reporter says it…
- Michael on “Teens always heard my music with their hearts. The beat was just happy. It didn’t have color or hidden meaning.” — Fats Domino
- sheila on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
- sheila on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
- Kristen Westergaard on “Paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” — William Faulkner on his writing requirements
- Todd Restler on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
- Todd Restler on All About Al podcast: Discussing Dog Day Afternoon
-
I’m trying to decide, do I try to imitate the low intelligence of the typical murderer, or do I invent a Humbert Humbert kind of murderer who is capable of giving an elegant literary description of the lake?
Why choose?? Do both!
Let me know what you come up with. :)
hmm…
:: cracks knuckles ::
Here’s the quick, I’ve running against a deadline and shouldn’t be doing this version:
The mirky lake cast a bloody reflection of the harvest moon. The ripples on the surface distorted the image and made it pulse, like a beating heart.
All he could see was the bright blue sky and the thick, cotton clouds below him, and for one brief moment he forgot what he had done and felt as if he was rocketing upwards into this beautiful sky.
Lovely, boys, just lovely. Keep ’em coming.
He stood by the lake. Quiet air, quiet dark water. And that afternoon, for the first time in months, there was quiet inside his head, too.
I think I need to add a sentence:
When his skull struck the surface of the lake he was puzzled that the sky had a glass ceiling, but then he rembered and then came the blinding light.
Do you think I need it?
I like it red!
The sun’s reflection hurts my eyes. It’s like little stabbing asterisks. She loved this place. I guess I used to. You’d think the water was warm. It looks warm, but it’s not. Way down at the other end of the lake, there’s a good place to picnic or fish.
I thought the game was over there. I already used up all my good words.
This is fun.
It’s cold today. There are patches of ice all along the edge of the lake. The sky is grey and still. After years of coming here, the lake looks different today…is different. This is a lake that has never seen the sun. What have I done?
homebru: I read yours over there. Nicely done. :)
These are very interesting to read – to see what some people focus on, the way they go at the description … very cool.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, red. Great fun (I also posted at Critical Mass):
The lake was still, a featureless slab of tungsten beneath the wild iron beauty of the predawn March sky. Postman ignored the raw cold and watched, as a good hunter ought: not moving at all, eyes, ears, and nose at full stretch. Fists in coat pockets, he hung back a few feet into a stand of still-bare birches and scanned the ground. He might have been a statue clad in a pea coat and watch cap; he might have been a deeper shadow among the shadows.
In a moment he heard it — the muffled crunch-crunch-crunch of footsteps in gravel. Still unmoving, he tried to hold even more still as the steady rhythm grew louder.
A figure — apparently an early-morning jogger — hove into view, pounding machine-like along the gravel. Postman’s eyes narrowed. Had the jogger looked into the birches? If he had, he gave no sign as his figure and the sound of his shoes on the gravel path receded into the distance, and finally into inaudible invisibility.
Still the lake lay umoving. Postman fingered the weight in his pocket. He could be out of the trees and into the clearing in a few seconds. A few seconds more to cross the path, taking extra time to reduce the noise of his passing. In all, he could be at water’s edge in less than half a minute.
As if, he thought with an inward smirk. They always drag the lake.
One more, then off to work.
Think I might go swimming. Across the way is Al and Sharon’s dock. Stupid Al and stupider Sharon, with their stupid cocktail parties and their stupid boat. They’re like everybody else around this stupid lake–dead fish and stinky smells.
Here’s my entry, with apologies to Thoreau:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. And there was a pond. But I can’t tell you what’s in the pond or I’d blow the rules of the game. Sorry.
red, thanks. Like the minnows in the lake, I usually stay hidden. There are too many big fish around.
Here’s mine reposted here with an edit or two:
It was a loud silence. The bared trees, their leaves now but a cushion upon the ground, echoing the death of summer’s green. And the lake, a mirror of bland grey and drab browns, immoble and cold. Death is a quiet thing, he thought. Calm. A basin with nary a ripple. He stared out over the body of water before him, the same broth teeming with youth and vigor in the heat of the summer, and saw death not as the reality of everything around him but as its mere reflection upon water. The more one disturbs the surface, the more the truth quivers.
He stepped down to the lake’s edge, kneeled, and eased his hands into death itself. The blood came off easily. “Water,” he remembered an old college professor saying, “the universal solvent.”
I love the way the lake looks on late summer mornings, how the surface seems almost to breathe as the warm waves gently climb up and down my ankles as I sit on the edge of the weach, that funny zone thats not quite wave and not quite beach, feeling the cool dampness slowly creeps up my dirtied Levis. The shallow, respiratory wave action that is so soothing, endless and unchanging. And yet, in my heart I know that soon the morning will come when theyll be a chill in the air, when I will walk here to the same spot and the surface will be still, when all the yearning in my heart wont bring back that soothing up and down motion.
Yeah, Ill need to clean these jeans, I guess.
yeah, i’ll need to edit, too.
‘creep’ i mean
I’m a little bit in love with all you people for playing this game so beautifully.
Carry on.
oh damn, ths points out it should be “there’ll” not “they’ll”. they sure sound the same in my mind…heh…d’oh
And the visions crowded in, blinding him, scalding him with their fury. He clawed desperately at his face and lurched backward from water’s edge. Startled by the sudden movement, blackbirds rose in a raucous cloud, abandoning skeletal trees, while leaden waters recorded the sinuous swirls of their passage. The widening circle of quiet ripples rolled on, forgotten in reflected drama. He had seen Avalon and he had seen the Lady. He had. For a precious breath, the fog slipped from his mind, only to gather and again enshroud him. Avalon perhaps, the last vestiges of sanity whispered. But there had been no Excalibur in her pale hand.
(I posted one version on Erin’s site already, here’s a different take):
“I eased the rowboat back into the shallows. No one had seen me borrow it; no one would know. I carefully climbed out – I was glad I had worn shorts under my trousers, and gladder I had brought a towel with me. I could suit back up behind the old hockey-equipment shed and get back to class in plenty of time. I suppose sometime they will start making us actually show up for study halls. If they knew I had been out, they’d start doing it immediately.
“I looked back over the lake. It was pretty calm, just a few ripples here and there. There were a few spots where bubbles rose to the surface, which alarmed me at first, but then I remembered Mr. Hansen talking about how this lake was partly spring-fed and so sometimes there just were bubbles. A bullfrog jumped out of the arrowheads around the edge, which scared me nearly shitless. At first I thought someone had seen me, which meant I’d catch hell for being out here, alone, during study hall. And then I’d have to explain why I was out, and I’m just not very good at lying, or so I’ve learned. When I found out it was a bullfrog I had a good laugh to myself about that.
“I looked at my watch. I still had a good twenty minutes, including the five minute walk back. I took a deep breath and thought about nothing – or rather, I thought about the leaves on the water’s surface, and the frogs, and the tiny fish under the water. I thought about the algae that I had turned up with my oars. And I thought about the mud. I wondered how deep it was, out there in the middle of the pond. I thought about winter, about how the pond would freeze over, ice a couple inches thick, and how we’d go out there and skate and play ice hockey, and all the while the frogs and little fish and mud and everything in the mud would be there, underneath us, as we skated. It gave me a sort of a chill, to think about it.
“After cooling down from having rowed, hard, out to the middle of the lake and back, and after calming my mind by thinking about the leaves on the water’s surface – that’s a Zen trick, by the way, my roommate Tom says he’s a Zen Buddhist and when he meditates he thinks of something from nature to clear his mind, and he says it also works when you need to calm down during an exam or something – I put my coat and tie back on, and walked up the hill towards Cook Hall.
“And as I walked, I laughed to myself. Wouldn’t Deenie be surprised when I told her? And wouldn’t she be pleased, and love me now, instead of him?”
this is tremendously fun – I had forgotten how fun it was to take a situation and just write something, get into a different voice and a different mind than the one I run around in all the time.
I seriously think I need to get the book Erin referred to.
I had backpacked to the lake, running away to it really, because it was isolated. It had taken most of a day of breathless scrambling over scree, patches of snow, and across a narrow rock shelf. The tarn lay high in the Rocky Mountains above tree line and above the anger and confusion of the modern world.
Gold had been discovered here many years ago and miners had lived here for years, pulling ore from mountain, dumping the tailings into the lake – poisoning it. Now the industrial scars were everywhere, great heaps of ashes, refuse, the last remains of buildings. Ghosts must haunt this place, I thought to myself.
In the early evening I walked to the shoreline. A stillness settled over the lake and it became a silver mirror, reflecting the grand scenery, the corruption wrought by the miners and the guilt on my face. I looked up at the setting sun. Freezing temperatures would come during the night here, even in August, and that would be a good thing.
ricki – I think I need to as well – it’s kind of relaxing, isn’t it? To just pick up the pen and start?
Caustic eyes survey the spasming eddies of color on the lake. He chuckles as he realizes that like his life, this pool of liquid had once been pristine, and now Man had dirtied it: Man had made it glow darkly red with the light of a setting sun. He lifts a hand from the water in which he sits, a weary grin as he watches the fluids that support all life run down his forearm, as if eager to rejoin depths and their newest inhabitant. His only response to the eagerness of dirty water to join it’s kin is to lower his arm back into the filth of life to retrieve his knife….and wonder if the bitch had cooked dinner yet.
He stumbled out onto the deck, his chest heaving with adrenaline, and steadied himself against its railing. He looked down at the lake below, saw the sun rising above its waters, heard the sounds of his neighbors starting the day.
“God!” he thought to himself. “All the years of sacrifice and toil and anguish — all for what? How could things have gotten so out of hand?”
He gripped the rail while his breathing slowed, and looked out upon the water, knowing he would never again see his dream home along the still waters of Spring Lake. How he had liked it up here near the Dead River; it took one’s mind off things.
He glanced down at the dock and over the water, and stared hard for a moment before turning away. There was precious little more to be done now, he knew, but he was certain of one thing.
Oh, how he would miss that boat.
Mist over water. Peripheries of silence. Not a sound except the low moanings of the wind. Weeds, dead leaves, and scattered sedge afloat. Emblems of our mortality. Virgil saw this, quam multa in siluis autumni frigore primo lapsa cadunt folia. Dead souls gathered on the shore. What difference a moment of passion can make. Her passion, mine. I saw them, and all was reft at once. She died for me then. Time was, her light adorned the world around it. Her touch like fiery dews that melt into the bosom of a frozen bud. Do I still want that touch? No, would refuse it. Vile, shallow slattern. If anger is fire, then grief is water. Thats not your way. Better to burn than drown.
Water so still I can see my face. So I saw myself reflected in her eyes. This is the mirror, and this the tain. The moon will rise soon. Darkness. Two blank eyes set in the black. Opaque violet. As vacantly as oceans moon looks on the moon in heaven. Won’t I still need those eyes? No. Yes. You will. Don’t fool yourself. You will. Sun scars that mirror; it hives me, burns out the orbs, and usurps the tain. Many tears to shed.
I could follow her. Would I find her there? Does the dark gate of death conduct to thy mysterious paradise? They neither marry nor are given in marriage. What remains for me here? Back I cannot go. I cannot hide here by this dark flood suspended in its course. The word the sea whispered me. Come, sweet death. In mercy, come quickly.
What was that? Raccoon. Lord Christ, one moment praying for death and the next jumping at nothing.
Five fathom nine. It was you rent us asunder, love. Her smiles. That one can smile, and smile.
Night is coming. I must leave. Useless to run, to resist. I will be with you soon, love, soon with you, hands stretched out toward the farther shore.
He would have washed his hands in the lake, but it was turning the same colour as the ochre soil.
He knelt at the edge of the lake. Water seeped into the knees of his jeans. The water was colder than the last time he’d been there. Winter was coming.
He swished the knife blade slowly through the water. The blood that came bright off the blade in sunlight looked inky in the light of the moon, just past full. Completing this part of the ritual at night wasn’t as satisfying. Not as satisfying, but safer. He dipped his cupped hands into the lake, let the water run through his fingers like… Inside, he knew just what it was like. He bowed deeply, touched his forehead to the water–one, two, three times and he was sanctified once again. At least for a while.
How many times had he been there? Kneeling at the shore, where the flat, smooth rocks were. 16 or 17, he recollected. Of course, the first time it had been an accident.
Forgot to bring mine over from the site…
==============================================
Still waters have a calming effect much like watching snowfall.
His run slowed to a trot. His lungs demanded air. His eyes, wet with tears saw a halo around the evening sun as it bounced off of the lake, turning everything a bright, glowing orange. He hadn’t truly noticed it until he escaped the woods.
Gasping, he clumsily ran into a tree, leaning for support. He didn’t care how long he had been running. He needed to breathe. He was in no shape to run as much as he had. He slid to the foot of the tree, ruining his shirt, whimpering like an injured child.
As he sat there, slumped and wheezing, he became lost in the calm reflection of the sky on the water. The sunlight dancing in the ripples…the autumn leaves sailing across the lake…he had finally stopped crying.
The water of the lake was like slow moving sheets of glass. Dark, quietly licking at the edge, it was the simplest noise in the world. He almost smiled at it, remembering a time when he was younger, stomping in puddles with his father holding his hand.
He remembered his Father.
Suddenly, he realized the tears on his face were cold. He looked at his hands. They had blood on them. Suddenly, the evening sun provided no warmth. He could hear a siren in the distance.
Exhaustively, he hauled himself to his tired feet, and tried to run as hard and fast as he just had.