Please take a look at all of the words below – and work them into some kind of paragraph that makes sense. It could be a narrative. An epic poem. A screenplay. But please somehow work them all in.
cemetery
restaurant
pastime
twilight
evensong
bullshit
Turkmenistan
nonsense
epistolary
spheres
panties
TWP (as in: Township)
Glendalough
Narragansett Beach
Alexander Hamilton
Orion
Mr. Darcy
James Joyce
Milky Way
Mac Cosmetics
music
theatre
family
books
beach
peace
Versailles
medieval
bimonthly
entropy
sneer
mud
gloomy
enervating
mahjong
elixir
halleluia
blueberry
calculus
Scone
pleather
hat-tip
“Meh.”
panties
(I got the inspiration here – so take a look if you want to just LAUGH and be in AWE of other people’s creativity).
I have to use panties twice; I like your thinking!
HAHA Oops!!!
Oh and Bingley – I seem to recall you loving the book Master and Margarita … do I have that right? I just finished it – wrote an enormous post on it – it’s somewhere below – but I just thought it was SO good!!
Panties. Panties.
Ew – Lisa’s gonna go nuts. Panties twice??
Ah, I did love that book; I will seek out your post at a later date, however, as my mind is all a-twitter with panties currently…
UNDERPANTS.
Well, I’m stuck here, done with work, waiting on my 5 pm class to start, so here goes…(Guess I’m the first taker…It is longer than a mere paragraph though. I did not use “panties” twice, however, nor did I use “elixir” twice which was also repeated on your list…)
I met him at the old restaurant that was near the cemetery. He seemed excited about something over the phone; usually his enthusiasms are nonsense but I was in a gloomy mood and thought listening to him bullshit about some silly pastime might raise me from the feeling of enervating entropy I had experienced for the past fortnight.
He came in with a sneer on his face; obviously his panties were in a wad about something. (I say that about him even though he’s a man; you’d say it too, if you know him and his moods).
“Have you seen this?!?” he exclaimed, opening his plether satchel and dumping the new issue of the Bimonthly Orion (a local literary journal from Narragansett Bay) on the table. “Garbage!” he exclaimed. “In this thing there’s a -well, it’s a sort of slash-fiction as epistolary novel, featuring Alexander Hamilton and Mr. Darcy.”
“Well,” I responded, trying to make a weak joke, “They were roughly contemporaries…”
“One was real and one was fictional! And Mr. Darcy wasn’t gay! And…and…I don’t know about Hamilton, but still! This is an outrage! This is as bad as that forgery last year, where they claimed they had found the ‘James Joyce of Turkmenistan’ and were just waiting on finding a translator for his books! Dammit, I can write circles around these idiots and yet, here I am, stuck in Brewster TWP doctoring plays for the Golddiggers of 1940.”
“Take a breath.” I warned him. “Get something to eat. You’ll feel better after tea and a blueberry scone.”
He breathed out; he knew he had no argument with me there. His blood sugar could make him as unstable as someone who had been on a Glendalough bender. At least he didn’t get mean; that’s more than I can say for my last boyfriend.
So I ordered him tea – the elixir this place provided was the finest anywhere short of Versailles or some other swank abode – and picked up two scones with the small spheres of butter they served alongside of them.
He sighed and sipped his tea; a few moments of peace. Twilight gathered outside the tea shop and it was a clear warm night for fall; you might even be able to see the Milky Way were you somewhere out away from the city. Maybe out on the beach. Somewhere a small bird launched into its evensong. Its music provided a counterpoint against the hum of the latte machines and the soft drone of foot-traffic.
“Ah, man,” he breathed. “I needed that. The only thing I’ve had to eat since breakfast was a hamburger that tasted of mud down in the theater district.”
“So you’re working on the rewrite again? How is it going this time?”
“Meh. All she wants to do is sit and play mahjong. I think she’s getting senile or something. You should see the lipstick she wears now … it’s just lurid.”
“Mac Cosmetics?”
“Cripes, I don’t know. I don’t look at the gunk women put on their faces. She’s got all this blue goo on her eyelids and big spots of rouge on each cheek. It creeps the hell out of me … it’s like something out of ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ I wish I could just sit down and write fiction and be done with all this-done with all this inane calculus of dealing with crazy faded stars, with trying to keep body and soul together while waiting for my ‘ship to come in,’ with negotiating the positively medieval system of patronage, these idiot grants where unless you make a hat-tip to Tom Wolfe or someone, you’re a persona non grata.”
“You could come stay with me. That would solve your rent problem and you could dump Baby Jane’s ass.”
“What would Jack say?”
“Oh, Jack moved out last week.”
“Oh, crap, Carol, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
“No, I count it as one for the ‘halleluia’ column. He had become increasingly paranoid-he accused me of letting squirrels store things in the attic and of putting bugs in his underwear drawer. I think he needs to get his head together. No, he needs biochemical alteration. So anyway, Conrad -come and stay with me, bro?”
“That’s definitely an idea. Thank God for family.”
“Yeah, thank God for family.”
ricki – i seriously cannot breathe. I am HOWLING – you are so amazing!
that is so damn awesome …
//This is as bad as that forgery last year, where they claimed they had found the James Joyce of Turkmenistan and were just waiting on finding a translator for his books! Dammit, I can write circles around these idiots and yet, here I am, stuck in Brewster TWP doctoring plays for the Golddiggers of 1940
//
I can’t breathe …
//Have you seen this?!? he exclaimed, opening his plether satchel and dumping the new issue of the Bimonthly Orion (a local literary journal from Narragansett Bay) on the table. Garbage! he exclaimed. In this thing theres a well, its a sort of slash-fiction as epistolary novel, featuring Alexander Hamilton and Mr. Darcy.
Well, I responded, trying to make a weak joke, They were roughly contemporaries //
You’re genius. I am so impressed. Tears of laughter are streaming down my face.
I live to serve, red. I live to serve.
It was twilight, and I was sitting in my favorite restaurant, Orion, cool elixir at my side. You know, the place in Scone Twp., near the cemetery. I was indulging in my favorite pastime, bullshit letter writing, something which has gained me no small measure of fame in that medival wild west (east?) that is Turkmenistan. Oh, sneer at my bimonthly nonesense, my letters, all you like. Yes! Laugh at poor Lawrence, as you laugh at my lisp, but as the Milky Way is my witness I swear it gives me great pleather to be known there as “Epistolary.”
Oh, I’m sure there are those among you who, whilst you are attending evensong and supposed to be contemplating the spheres in the firmament, the glorious calculus that causes them to move just so, the music and grand theatre of their march across the gloomy Glendalough sky. “Halleluia!” you should cry.
But no.
As you sit in peace on the beach and stare aloft, sipping your malted elixir, to where fly your thoughts? To Narragansett Beach! To that enervating night of mud and mahjong, where a hat-tip from your family (safely ensconsed with their books in Versailles) led you down the perilous path to entropy.
There.
That night.
On that beach.
Mr. Darcy in panties.
Alexander Hamilton in edible blueberry panties.
James Joyce tarted up in Mac Cosmetics….
Meh.
i was going to type something worth reading, but i’m honestly too busy howling at Mr. Bingley’s contribution!
the James Joyce of Turkmenistan
‘when they have one we will read him’
hahahahahaha, i love that!
I tell you, the hardest thing about this is forcing myself not to read what someone else has written. I was writing and I saw ricki had submitted and i had to turn off the computer so i wouldn’t look and finish mine in ‘purity’!
hehehe. but now i get to enjoy all the others.
Mr. Bingley – I am freakin’ DYING HERE.
I can’t even speak.
I love that you ended with Meh. I’m DYING.
I’m going to have nightmares (or perhaps the OTHER kind of dream) about Alexander Hamilton in “edible blueberry panties”
Seriously – you guys are SO AWESOME.
I can’t stop laughing.
I thought you’d like that line, especially the ‘edible’ part.
Always be good to the hostess, that’s my motto.
Ha!! Also that you made “plether” into something someone said with a lisp …
YOU’RE NUTS!!!!!!
(that’s a compliment in Sheila-Land)
I have been wandering around my apartment, cooking, watering my plants, and randomly howling about you and ricki’s stories. It made my night!
//So youre working on the rewrite again? How is it going this time?
Meh. All she wants to do is sit and play mahjong.//
HAHAHA
I’m cracking up about how both of us had our restaurants by the cemetery…it’s like we both printed the same list out and started off in order and then went ‘shit! got to mix it up a bit!’
hehehe.
actually, i did print the list out, and it’s sitting here in front of me with little check marks by each word as they were used.
ha!! yes – most restaurants are, indeed, placed near cemeteries.
what??
Too funny. I love that you printed it out.
You’re both geniuses.
Mine’s longer than a paragraph too. In fact, I can’t post the whole thing, so please forgive if I manually link (the trackback ain’t a-workin’ none neither. Meh.)
And HEY I used Orion Diner too! Do I owe royalties?
Well done, ‘Fly! I knew you couldn’t stay away from this.
That was like a mini Edgar Allan Poe story, Nightfly – amazing!!!
Oh and I will be upgrading in the next week or so so my stupid trackback will work again.
Meh.
I also have to say HOW GOOD it felt to be doing some fun, playing-around type writing again. I miss that kind of creativity. I used to write lots of little vignettes kind of like that one and it kind of fell by the wayside as I got busier and as I told myself “grown ups who aren’t ‘serious’ writers don’t do that kind of thing.”
but maybe…maybe sometimes on my blog I’ll just have to bust out with a little scene of fiction now and again, just to keep myself happy.
ricki – Yeah, I gotta say – you totally set up these other types of people – with their own voices – it was a whole world. I mean, even despite the fact that you somehow had to weave in the stupid words from my list. I loved it.
“Oh, crap, Carol, I’m sorry” …
ha!!
You know… I do think we lose something in the transfer when we stop believing in “bang bang you’re dead”. I know we have to grow up and all … but i still think that that ability to play make-believe is one of the most beautiful things about us humans!
It was awesome to read your piece – also, I love how you launched right into it with no apology. Ha!!!
Bang bang you’re dead. If you say that – and you believe it – then I’m likely to believe it too!
:)
Agred, ricki – I loved little exercises like this in my classes at college.
My only regret is that I didn’t work in “Jamie Langenbruner.” He doesn’t even play for my favorite team, and he wasn’t on Sheila’s list, but I love the name “Langenbruner.” (Maybe that’s the name on the headstone…)
Yes – “Langenbruner” is subliminal in your story.
I nearly did it – missed a couple out….
They sat opposite each other saying everything and nothing all at once. They talked about the traffic, their days at work and all the other nonsense and bullshit that you talk about when you’re too scared to talk about what was going on right now. He wanted to say “I love you” and that she was the elixir for his aching life. But he wasn’t allowed. This wasn’t allowed. They couldn’t be together. And to say it would be to admit that.
They left the restaurant at twighlight, and although the gloomy sky hung with the mud of city smog they both knew that the heavens lay above them, before them – the milky way with its never-ending luminescence, the spheres on Orions belt always there to point the way towards safety; towards happiness. They knew that because it was necessary to know that these things were there, and that there was some way for this all to be alright. That there was some way for them to be together, someday, somehow, somewhere. That in the theatre of life there would be a happy ending. But the enervating weight of the situation before them had weakened his ability to come out and say what he felt; trying to find the right words was like trying to do calculus on a hangover, and even though in the solitude of his own mind his thoughts had the beauty of a James Joyce passage, trying to actually say it was like trying to recite the Turkmenistan national anthem backwards.
He wanted to run away with her, leave the complexities behind, and start a family in Glendalough, Narragansett Beach, Versailles; wherever. To read books and make music and laugh and play. To grow old together and join a bimonthly mahjong club, and to eat scones with blueberry jam for a treat. Where she was his favourite pastime, and he was hers. And he was just about to say this, when he caught the sneer of a passer by wearing a pleather jacket triggered the entropy in his throat, and he stopped.
He couldn’t tell her this. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t her Mr Darcy – the other guy was. How could he tell her that he loved her more than Darcy could dream of? He was suddenly aware neither of them had spoken in several minutes. The silence was as both as penetrating as dusk at a cemetery, and as joyous and poignant as the final hallelujah of evensong. He looked her in the eye and smiled. “Meh.” He said. “What?” she asked “Tell me..”
“You do know that I l…”
“I know.” She said, and gently kissed him on the cheek. Silence. And then she was gone, walking through the crowds of people that until now he hadn’t noticed. It would be okay. One day.
ilovecress – from RTG, right?? Hi there!
Your piece was AMAZING. You even managed to make it poignant and tragic – even though you were forced to include such sentences as:
//to actually say it was like trying to recite the Turkmenistan national anthem backwards. //
HA! Beautiful!!!
Thank you for playing – you people all amaze me.
Office memorandum. James Joyce to Mr. Darcy, Claims Manager, Narragansett Beach , July 16, 1938. Dear Darcy: I suppose you’ll sneer and call this bullshit an epistolary when you hear it. Well, I don’t like the word ‘epistolary.’ I don’t like the word entripy. And I’m not fond of evensong either. I just want to set you right about some nonsense you couldn’t see because it was smack up against your blueberry. Remember that? At the restaurant? In Glendalough TWP? It was our bi-monthly theatre meeting at the Versailles where we reviewed the calculus.You think you’re such an elixir as a Claims Manager; a real Alexander Hamilton. Such an Orion on a phony claim. Meh! Maybe you are. You’re certainly good at mahjong. But let’s take a look at that Turkmenistan claim, Accident and Double Indemnity. You were pretty gloomy in there for a while, Darcy. You said it wasn’t an accident. Check. You said it wasn’t suicide. Check. You said it was murder. Check. You thought you had it cold, didn’t you? All wrapped up in spheres with pink pleather around it. the perfect beach book. It was perfect – except it wasn’t, because you made one mistake. Just one little mistake. When it came to picking the killer, you picked the wrong guy. You want to know who killed Turkmenistan? It was pastime, twilight actually, near the cemetary. Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Darcy. I killed Turkmenistan – me, James Joyce, Mac Cosmetics salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, medieval, no family, no visible scars…It was enervating. (He glances down at his shoulder wound, at the mud stains) – until a while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for music and for a Milky Way. I didn’t get the scone and I didn’t get the panties. And I can’t get any peace either. Pretty, isn’t it?’ There’s your hat-tip Darcy. Halleluia!
Hank – HAHAHA!!! I love it! I love the whole hardboiled Sam Spade voice.
//All wrapped up in spheres with pink pleather around it. the perfect beach book.//
HA!!!
OK, here’s my humble contribution to the cause!