A while back I started a handwritten journal/diary thing in a Moleskine journal/diary thing (look up what a Moleskine journal/diary thing is on Google or something).  Anyway, I had planned to only write in Xanga for fiction, and to save my journal/diary entries for my Moleskines.  Well now I want to change that.  I want to put everything into my Xanga and take a break from writing in the Moleskine.  I don’t know why.  I think I just love the sound of the keyboard, you know?
     Anyway, this is how I would start a Moleskine diary entry: [date] + [entry number] + [Title of Entry].  So that’s basically what I’m gonna do here on Xanga–for the title I’m going to put the entry number, starting off with the number that I left off with in the Moleskine.  Got it?  ‘Course you don’t, ’cause no one is reading this entry. 
     Bah, humbug.

     I sat in the back corner of the depressing English class and drew a caricature of the teacher.  Mrs. McLeech had a hook nose, droopy-cornered lips, wrinkles, and huge hair that was slightly more “out there” on the left side of her head than on the right.   Her glasses made her look like an owl, they were so big and round.  Or maybe they just appeared that way over her beady eyes.
     And I must say that to draw a caricature of a woman with the aforementioned features is quite difficult, for how does one go about drawing a caricature of a caricature?  How do you make a drama more dramatic without ruining it?  No one can really answer these questions–only demonstrate.  Watch: I make the hook more of a hook, the big, round glasses even more big and round (near impossible, I’m telling you what), the wrinkles deeper, more defined.  It’s an art. 
     And Mrs. McLeech’s jewelry was not jewelry, but regalia: brooches and necklaces bigger, rounder than her glasses’ lenses.
     Her clothes were always those things that older women wear: an olive green or bright red or beige women’s suit jacket complete with matching pants.
     She was a bit overweight.  But that was okay because she was nice, somewhat.
     I say “somewhat” because last semester we had to write a paper on Beowulf for her.  The problem was, I didn’t read the book.  The other problem was, the paper was due the next day.   So here’s what I figured: I can either write a serious paper and get an F on it, or I can have fun with it and get an F on it.  And when you weigh those two outcomes, what does it matter how you get there?  With this reasoning, I decided to go ahead and have fun with it. 
     The next day, before turning it into Mrs. McLeech, I showed the paper to the previous year’s (my junior year’s) English teacher, Mr. Heinz.  He loved it.  Naturally, this gave me a bit of confidence.  Then he told me I was going to get an F on it from Mrs. McLeech since I didn’t read the book and got the paper all wrong.  And there went my confidence.   But no matter; it was a fun paper to write.  I turned the paper in to Mrs. McLeech.
     The next day, she comes knocking on my art-class door and asks me to see her in the hall.  Of course it was about Beowulf.  I followed Mrs. McLeech through the halls of the school, till finally she stopped outside her classroom.  She had a chair waiting for me and everything.  I sat down.  She then went on the lecture me about how my paper upset her and how it was rude and all that stuff.  She called my paper a diatribe (look it up–I had to).
     When the papers came back to us in the next few days, there was red ink all over mine–teacher’s notes, that is.  Red ink is a substance to be feared by students all around.  They know what it means–corrections, mini-lectures, rants…yeah, there was a lot of red ink on my paper.
     Boring story, I know. 

(check back occasionally, ’cause this entry is soon to be continued)
         

©The
crack of dawn was quite the crack for Tommy Stark, aged ten. He had
never been awake that early except for the times he had been sick as
a younger child.

Today
he was going to shoot a deer. His first hunt. As his father told
him, he would be a “man” at the end of the day. Tommy did not
particularly want to become a man just yet, but, as would be any
ten-year-old, he was still excited to hold a gun. Especially a
rifle.

Tommy’s
alarm clock buzzed its buzz and woke him. He loved movies, and
learned from them that one is supposed to groan when the alarm goes
off, and then slam his hand on top of it. He did just that, despite
his awakened excitement.

He
sat up in bed, looked out the window: still dark out, but with the
hint of a blue sunrise on the horizon.

A
knock at the door. His father came in without waiting for an answer,
but with this to say:

“Wake
up, boy. Today’s the day!”

*
* *

The
air in the mountains had a scent to it, an undefined seasoning. It
was cold enough to see one’s breath, but there was still a touch of
warmth that made one look up at the sky through the interweaving
branches and wonder how it all could be.

The
sunrise was now a bursting pink rose.

“See
that sunrise, boy? Beautiful. Absolutely be-yewtiful. That’s a
sunrise to remember, boy. But that sunrise is for the poets and
writers to interpret, not for us guys. Always know that ‘poet”s
just another word for ‘pansy.’ Always remember that. That, and this
day–remember this day, because today you make your first kill. You
become a man today! Oh, life
is good.”

They continued their march through the dead leaves on the ground, and
the occasional ones drifting down like feathers. Father and son were
quiet for a while, until one of them spoke:

“How
old were you when you
became a man, pop?”

“Same
as you: ten bloody years old. And talk about bloody! My first kill,
ah, God! It was terrific! My dad took me out just like you and I
are doin’ right now. We was on this very trail, in fact.

“We
came to a stream. He said we was bound to run into a dear at that
stream, and so we waited about thirty yards away from it, layin’ down
behind a rotten log, a huge, fallen tree! You know what thirty yards
is? S’almost a hundred feet! Anyway, as we was layin’ there, we ate
our lunch–just some sandwiches like we got today–when all of a
sudden we see this buck, a ten-pointer at least, comin’ out into the
clearin’ to drink from the stream! See, Tommy? Life is
good, hah! So my daddy, he hands me his gun, right? Says, ‘Quick,
boy, before it gets away!’ So I aim–I’m lookin’ right down the
barrel of my daddy’s rifle with a ten-point buck in my sites, and
I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the happiest moment of my life! Anyway,
I’m aimin’, the buck’s sippin’ from his stream, and I bam!
blow his brains right out! Hahaaa! Yessir, it was a great day in
history for your ol’ pop!”

Tommy
thought over the story. “Did you keep the horns?”

“Antlers,”
replied Tommy’s father.

“Well
did you keep them?”

“You
bet I did.”

“Where
are they now?”

Silence
from Tommy’s father; he just kept on trudging through the spiced
forest.

*
* *

They
came to a log.

“Is
this the tree, pop?”

“Nope,
it’s just up ahead, though. In fact…yep, there it is! Look!”

The
log was a great one, four feet wide. It carried itself so far off
into the distance that Tommy couldn’t see the end of it; wasn’t, in
fact, sure that it even had
an end.

So
this must be what thirty yards looks like,
he thought.

The
bark of the great beast had crumbled off and gathered into a mush on
the forest floor, the result of decades of disease and rot. The
roots of the tree reached up into the air ten feet, crooked giant’s
fingers in a small and quiet world.

“Good
Lord! This thing sure has grown! Must still have some life in it,
’cause it sure wasn’t this big when I was a boy. Either that, or
we’re at the wrong place. But look over there! There’s the stream.”
He pointed. “Well, anyway, here we are, ol’ Tom, the spot where
you gain your manhood.”

Tommy’s
father leaned forward against the log, chest touching the smooth
skin. “Know what we do now?

“What?”
asked Tommy.

“We
wait. See, hunting is a game of patience, not life and death, as
most people seem to think. Sure, life and death does show itself,
makes itself clear in this game, but it’s mostly just waiting it out,
waiting it out. You see a fawn, you don’t shoot, you wait. Know
why? ‘Cause where there’s a baby, its mama’s gonna be right close
by. So it’s all about patience. And there’s nothing wrong with
waiting is there, Tommy?”

“No,
pop.”

“We
just gotta enjoy the nature of it all, enjoy the smell of the woods,
the sound of the stream flowin’ over the rocks. Sure is be-yewtiful,
boy. But again–poetry’s for the pansies.

“Now,
remember what I told you back home: we gotta talk as little as
possible here, and when we do gotta talk, we whisper, got it?”

“Yeah,
pop.”

“Call
me sir for once, will ya?”

“Yes,
sir.”

“And
hand me a san’wich.”

Tommy
thought on it all. He really did enjoy nature, he realized. He
appreciated the sounds of the forest: birds twittering, leaves
rustling about, the stream bed making soft melodies over sand and
rock. Up until this point, he had been eager to hold the gun and
look down the barrel as his father had. But why disrupt this peace?

“Sir?”

“Yeah,
boy?” His father spit sandwich bits as he said it.

“Why
are we doing this?”

“What’s
that?”

“Why
do we kill like this? What’s the point of shooting a deer?”

Tommy’s
father thought it over. Then: “You’re not turnin’ soft on me, are
ya?”

“No,
sir! Honest!”

“…Good.
Then never you mind.”

And
then there, like a holy artifact in the dirt: a five-point buck. A
beautiful thing, with its ears back and white tail up and its
majestic crown of antlers. And Tommy, ten years old, but not too
young to see the perfect innocence about it.

Tommy’s
father spit out his sandwich, nearly crying out.

“Tommy!”
he hoarsely whispered. “There!”

He
shoved the rifle into his son’s arms.

Tommy
felt it in his hands, and suddenly it was ugly to him. No longer a
thing of perfection, but something meant to kill.

“Uh–”

“Aim,
boy!”

Tommy
aimed.

“Now,
you got it? Now fire, boy, fire!”

Tommy
froze.

His
father yanked the rifle out of his hands and pushed him to the
ground.

“You
little son of a bitch,” directed at Tommy.

A
gunshot.

Birds
flew.

The
sounds stopped.

*
* *

The
car ride home was mostly quiet. Tommy sat in the back, afraid of his
father.

“You
let me down, boy. You let that bastard get away, and he could have
been mine.”

Tommy
dared speak: “You never actually shot that deer when you were a
kid, did you?”

His
father stared ahead. “…No. But I almost had him, I did! I shot
the gun when my dad said to. He didn’t know I wasn’t aimed right,
though. Ended up just hitting a tree, and the buck got away. But my
daddy, boy, he gave me a good slaughterin’ when I got home. I
deserved it, though. I let him down.”

“What’s
a slaughtering?”

“You’ll
see when we get home.”

“I
don’t think you deserved it. You didn’t do it on purpose, dad, you
just accidentally missed. That’s all. You just missed.”

There
was silence for the rest of the trip.

*
* *

They
finally arrived home and got out of the car. Tommy walked up to the
front door and reached for the handle when his father called to him.

“Hey,
Tommy.”

Tommy
turned around.

“Yes,
sir?”

“You
was thinkin’ out there today, weren’tcha?”

“About
what, pop?”

“You
meant for that buck to live, didn’tcha?”

He
looked at his sneakers. “…Yes, sir. It was beautiful.
Be-yewtiful, as you would say. It made me feel happy and at peace,
like I wanted to just stay in those woods forever.”

His
father thought on these words.

“My,
my…you’re a poet, Tommy. I didn’t know we had it in our blood.
I’m sorry….”

They
went inside, father’s arm over son’s shoulders.

END©

The wind kept waking me up last night; kept hitting the front of the house like howling dogs ready to attack.  Bloody wind.  I think I heard them, the weathermen, say it would reach 45 or 50 miles per hour.  That’s one heck of a fast blow, man!  Anyway, I think I’m going to quit writing blogs now, and focus on actual handwritten journals/diaries.   They are more fun, I think.  The point of this blog was to get people to read it and make friends with those people.  Well I’ve already accomplished that (Rachel).  I mean, I’m not going to shut down the blog — all the entries will always be up here for my own benefit.  But I just think I’m going to stop writing in it.  For a while, at least.  I have a notebook, now, that I write my thoughts and poems and all that good junk in.  So for those of you who wish to comment one of my entries, well, go for it.  If you want to be my friend, MySpace me at www.myspace.com/whothennow24.  Funny how that word “MySpace” has become a verb.  Ain’t it?

This poem is unformatted. It’s just in paragraph form for now. Here it is:

To write a love poem for the angel spread out at my left I lie atop our summer-cool sheets, and that word, “love,” it busies around in my mind trying to pour forth from my pen and into my notebook, a being without substance. For that word…it doesn’t even begin to unveil my feelings for her. The moon will turn red and shatter, and the sun burn itself up into ash like a great and holy match held between finger and thumb by a quivering child before I could find the ability to finish in on sitting telling how I feel for this winged beauty. But I am no poet, and therefore must resort to the meaningless: I love you, my sweet.

I saw Miranda yesterday, April 12, 2007. It lasted about 50 minutes. She was in Manhattan for a field trip, and she called me the night before to ask me to come visit her for lunch. I did. And now I’m thoroughly depressed. I miss her so much. We hugged. We kissed. Gosh, I love her, people.

     No, no, that’s all wrong!  “I’m doin’ real good,” you say?  It’s “I’m doin’ real-ly well.”  Dumb people these days.  Stupid, dumb people, getting their own language mixed up and jumbled around in a mess.  People confusing “I”s with “me”s and “us”es with “we”s like it’s one great Forget Your Language party!  Boy, oh, boy, what’s this world coming to?
     What’s that?  A “stickler,” you say?  No, no, I wouldn’t call myself a stickler of grammar; I just happen to know what’s correct!  And you can’t call me a bad guy for it, can’t call me a bully.  But one of us, my friend, you can call a dummy, and it certainly ain’t me!

Start my first day on the job at Regal (the movie theatre).  Vish me luck.

Five-foot three, unpretty, bitter, middle-aged and overweight; disbelieves in dreams and possibilities; divorced. Her jeans are dirty, her shirt is wrinkled, her hair in a frizzy bun. These words do not merely describe a one Mary Elmore; they also define her.

She steps out the screen door and sits on the front steps of her home. It is a large house sitting on a plot of grass barely big enough to call a yard, and neighbors so close you can almost hear their secrets when they whisper.

She draws from her breast pocket a cigarette: cancer, rolled and filtered and waiting to be inhaled. She lights it and takes a deep drag.

She peers up at the night sky, drawing in the magic of the universe. She catches Orion’s gaze and looks back down at her summer-calloused feet. Too many barefooted walks down heat-soaked sidewalks and through wood-chipped parks lately.

She finishes her cigarette and sets it in the ashtray at her side.

“Bastard,” she says to the filthy thing.

She stands and steps down the four porch stairs, leaving the cigarette to burn away into a forgotten substance in the warm air.

Feller’s. That’s where she decides to go tonight. Feller’s Park – designed years and years and years ago by a man called Seymour Feller. His was a soul that greatly despised children. So why did he want a park and playground built for them? To keep “the sons of bitches” out of his hair, and the hair of all the adults of Flathill, Michigan. It remains to this day the only all-wood playground in town. There is a swing set for the aviators-at-heart, a slide for the downhill skiers, monkey bars for the swashbucklers, and a jungle gym for the future mountain climbers.

Mary heads around to the back of her house and begins her walk through the many “yards” she has to cross to reach her destination.

Halfway there, a black cat crosses her path. Mary gives a start. Despite her lack of superstition, her rejection of old wives’ tales, it unnerves her.

“Bastard,” she mutters. Everything is a bastard to Mary Elmore. She is quite the cynic.

And her destination is reached. She sets out for the swing set.

Suddenly: an ear shattering blast, as a green column of light from the sky shoots down and envelopes Mary Elmore, Scum of the Earth, and she falls to the ground, hands to her ears, shuts her eyes, and screams, she screams and screams, but the whole world covers its ears to her screams, they don’t hear, they don’t hear for the roar from the thing in the sky, the thing in the sky!, and Mary sees her whole life and cries for it to change, to be different, to be someone else, as she peeks upward from the ground and sees a white light appear at the top of the green column from a hatch in the thing in the sky, an opening door!

Gravity, for Mary Elmore, ceases to exist.

She blacks out.

     Sleep.  I can hear it trying to sneak up on me.  It tries to lure me with the promise of fantastic dreams.  It ties strings to my eyelids and tugs.

     The most fragile thing in the world is the head of a baby.  If you drop a baby, not only does it break, but it dies.  The head hits the hardwood and suddenly there is a flat area on the scalp that was not there before, completely warping this baby’s precious skull in one quick, soft, yet crushing sound.

     Back at B&N.  Let’s observe.
     A woman here who frequents this place often, always sitting here with her eleven- or twelve-year-old son who reads Japanese comics, a.k.a. manga.  Except he isn’t here right now.  He’s probably off in an aisle of his favorite comics, gawking at the scantily clad comic-book women on the book jackets.  He is me.
     (Why am I so nervous?  I’m tapping my foot against the tile floor and biting my nails as if what I’m writing will be put on display.  Let us hope not!)
     She gets up, orders two coffees at the counter, comes back to put one of them on her table, and then she walks off again, the other coffee in her hand.  Who is the second coffee for, I wonder?
     Ah, here comes her smaller child.  I forgot about him.  He’s carrying a book in his hand, a rather thick science-fiction.  Obviously he just likes the picture on the cover: rocket ships and dragons, things of the young mind (he looks to be about five years old).
     He hands the book to his mother, who looks doubtful.  “Is it for kids?” he asks ever so hopefully.
     “No, it’s not for kids.”  She gives it back to him and he riffles through the pages.
     “But I like it,” he insists, watching the pages flip across his eyes.
     She ignores him and sips the one coffee in her hand.  “Let’s go.”
     “Alright, let me go put this back.”  A responsible young lad!
     She tells him he’s a good boy as he runs off amongst the glorious tables and aisles of books books books.
     But then he comes back with something else.  I can read part of the spine: .Hack something.  He hands this to his mother, just as before.
     “Where are you finding these?” she asks incredulously.
     She takes it from him and they go walking off, hand in hand, just as it should be.

     Who passes by the Barnes & Noble window?
      A black man in his late forties, heavy-set and grizzle-faced, smoking a cigarette like it’s his promised last, like he’s just had one too many.  He carries a blue plastic grocery bag in his right hand.
      A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old hispanic on a bike.  He comes from the nearby ghetto for one reason or another.  My guess is he’s come to this shopping center for the CVS drugstore, a cheap place for basic groceries and medicines.  Maybe his mom is sick.  Maybe his dad is threatening him with his belt, that if he doesn’t get out and get medicine right now, there’ll be some new scars on his butt tonight.
     A woman carrying a large briefcase-type thing on her shoulder, a laptop bag, perhaps.  I’ve seen people with laptops at the nearby Panera Bread.  Maybe that’s where she’s headed.
     Nobody too interesting.