Soap Opera tragedies...

I push, I pull
The days go slow
Into a void
We filled with death

from - Little Earthquakes by Beck

So I socially died the day after the day after Valentine’s Day. Luckily it was only a soap opera tradgedy and today is the day my blood besmirched hand pulls itself ominously up from the cliff. Those characters never die, they are mysteriously thrown to amnesia land where they can be brainwashed into believing they are some sorta foreign royalty.

Sickness apparently isn’t selective as to what dates are convenient to it’s victim. Your allergies do not care that you have a concert, your bronchitis doesn’t care that you have to go to work, your headache does not diffentiate between the YMCA and your bedroom.

My nose is no longer a functioning body part, but a uselss deadweight for sun glasses to sit on. Since my nose has went on an extended hiatus, my mouth has been working double overtime. Breathe, chew. Breathe, eat. Breathe, Speak. BREATHE, JUST BREATHE, and DON’T THINK ABOUT BREATHING.

Coughing only segued to more coughing rarely producing anything more than the Triscuit I had bravely tried to eat earlier in the day. Attempts at productivity were greeted with migraine headaches.

During this “down” time, I as able to take in massive amounts of useless TV. I’m now familiar and consequently addicted to Project Runway. You think it’s hard being a model, try dressing someone in fern leaves. Heidi Klum is mean.

I tried some reading and attempts at creativity, but quickly retreated when I realized I had to hold head upright or more than thirty seconds.

I realized I was becoming an annoying sick person when I looked around my room and questioned the arrival of aliens. You see I had about 50 half filled glasses of various liquids sitting here and there ala M. Knight Shyamalan’s “Signs.”

So today despite drugs and *new family trauma, I am here. I’m sedate, tranquilized, a little somber but I’m here.

No losers in this lottery...

Book It?

It was suprisingly easy to pick my three favorite books:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice,
or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the
instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God;
I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

-John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

I became what I am today, at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the
winter of 1975.

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've
been turning over in my mind ever since.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

From my never-to-be-written debut novel Thank You, Dear, the opening sentence:

Someday you will meet somebody who changes everything you know about what kind of person you are; somebody who will make you do crazy things you always knew you would never do; the things you thought you were to smart for. Someday soon.

Book It

So here's my pics for favorite novel intro...and my own...

From “The Cheese Monkeys” by Chip Kidd.

“So, what are you taking?”
At that point I could have said a lot of things – I could have said, “If I don’t get the classes I need after waiting five hours in this line, I am taking that clipboard out of your sausage fingered hands, breaking it into ten thick splinters, and slowly introduce each one of them beneath your cuticles as way of say Thanks for herding us like a flock of three thousand Guatemalan dirt pigs into a ventilation hall built for three hundred in order to ask us question we’ve already answered so many times our minds are jelly and our jaws squeak an act which has to be covered somewhere in the Bible as punishable by an manner we, in His righteous stead, see fit”.

From “Peter Pan” by J.M. Barrie

“All children, except one, grow up.”


From “It” by Stephen King

"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat...

From “A Hasty Departure from the Script” by Leslie Paxton

“Despite having taken a series of redundant steps to avoid this conversation, Gail found herself positioned face to face with the former Prom Queen, who once stately, was now reduced to handing out cheese nips in Wal-mart.”

Book It!!

So Leslie handed down an interesting challenge. Take your 3 favorite books & transcribe the first three lines from each. Then write an opening line(s) of your own debut novel, and somehow we will all be better people, so here goes with mines:

From “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior
at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but
Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of
his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his
foxhole, was his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the
tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

From “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris:

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the
scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or
office. The door opens and the person holding the knob is asked to
identify himself. The agent then says, “I’m going to ask you to come with
me.”

From “ A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The
green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that
grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals
indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the
bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with
disapproval and potato chip crumbs.

Okay…so, for my debut novel, entitled “Get in Your Red Bed”, I only have one line and you’ll just have to like it:

Most summer nights, Tommy Lee Ferber sang nonsense songs on our front stoop as
he strummed away at his guitar-shaped scrub board someone made for him at the
VFW.

Deja Entendu

On being injustly accused (but acquitted):

Tiesha: Someone left the oven on last night.
Terrell: Well I’m pretty sure I turned it off.
Tiesha: I’m honestly not even sure Leslie knows how to “use” the oven.
Leslie: Hey!!

On acceptance:

The suits: This can’t be right.
Leslie: It is right - I made it in CHART.
The suits: Why does it look different then the last one?
Leslie: BECAUSE IT WAS DRAWN. It was not created by the chart program.
The suits: So what program was the last one made in?
Leslie: None, no program..those are hand drawn squares. Inaccurately, if I may add.
The suits: Well, let’s do it the old way...we feel it’s more correct done in that manner.

On self discovery:

Leslie brain: You know despite having no contact with anyone on the internet today, you have somehow accomplished even less.

On precious illusions:

L: I thought the most jarring thing about Brokeback Mountain was seeing Anne Hathaways boobs.
A: I probably would have had the same reaction. My daughter watches the Princess Diaries alot.
L: I kept thinking......No Ella no.

On comedy:

* I hate to give the "Touched by an Angel" answer but I find humor in alot of things.”
Larry: Say Hi to Ricardo.
Leslie: is that the guy with the weird last name??
Larry: who - Viazcan?
Leslie: ( in faux Butthead..) yeah, uhh, huhh huhh Ass Can..huh hha ass can..
R: Get used to my last name, you’ll learn to love it when we are married.
Larry: you’re on speaker phone asstard.

Larry's Home!

I know he doesn't read this. He's not a blog reading (or bookmark) kind of kid. All things aside. I'm just glad my brother is home. Despite being 6ft whatever, 200+lbs, he'll always just be 12 to me.

I missed you - now come to Norfolk and help me clean up my disgusting room.
L
:)