Since you asked for more, 2 more self indulgent short stories...

[JMP300z]

Original post with original story can be found here: This much metal has no right to be this high up.

These two are somewhat similar in that they both deal with my childhood and are mostly factual. The narrator of all three of these can easily be construed into the same person although the tone is definitely different b/w these 2 and somewhat different from the first(can be attributed to mood or tweaked a bit). This is important as many of you responding to my last story said they would like to read more and Im considering piecing them together into larger work.

Please feel free to nit pick at whatever you so desire. Grammar freaks have a field day.

Lowercase i

It was in the third grade that we first practiced cursive on our newsprint pads. I know it was the third grade because I still have the Care Bears Valentine’s card Sara Wagner gave me that year. The 3x2 inch rectangle still reads in neat script: “To: Joshua B., Love: Sara T. W.” It definitely wasn’t the second grade; that year her Fraggle Rock card read in bubbly print: “To Josh, Love Sara.” I’m not sure how our relationship changed in that brief year so that I graduated from Josh to Joshua B., or why she felt inspired to include her middle initial T. for Taylor. I think she gave lifesavers both years but can’t be certain, the candy was gone by recess. I probably wasn’t the only dreaming boy to have kept her cards.

The third grade was filled with landmarks for me, I won the grade’s checkers championship (I fell short in the chess semifinals). I also starred as the one of 15 tin men in our grade’s production of the Wizard of Oz. But really, the third grade was about cursive. With outrageous claims like “You can write faster!” we were pushed into our studies. The girls immediately took to the curves and continuity of this new print; the boys struggled, longing for just one hard acute angle (perhaps a masculine M). The exercises began between the dashed and solid bars of that fragile news print with the lowercase vowels. Eventually we were turned loose on the daunting capital F’s and G’s (some of you may wonder about Q, I’ll teach you a trick, it’s just a giant 2). Some students even attempted the inexplicable z, but the smarter ones just moved on and never looked back. Cursive was the language of grownups.

I remember our teacher making such statements as, “In the business world, everyone writes in proper script.” I even recall her boldly asserting, “Any notes not written in script are immediately discarded without being read.” Print font was worse than unacceptable, it was unprofessional.

I knew she wasn’t telling the whole truth. I mean, who would care if I couldn’t properly squiggle a z? Not that it really matters any more, we learned later in the fifth grade that computers were the new language of grownups. We also discovered how to make giant banners pronouncing in great block letters, “Josh is AWESOME,” or “Knowledge is half the battle.” (If anyone knows the other half, or even a quarter of the battle, please email me at eaddress@forstory.com). But in the third grade, there was no one left doubting that cursive was the law; cursive was the full battle.

For some reason, teachers became lax on the cursive requirements during middle school. Maybe they knew the computer revolution was upon us; maybe they were satisfied that the third grade had already prepared us for the professional world. I know high school was good for getting into college, but without cursive, middle school I can only assume was about giant sized girls, squeaky voices, and those first, awkward school dances.

I’ve come a long way since those days. I’m more mature; I occasionally use cursive. With my own credit card, I can sign my name to any amount of debt, and, I must admit that cursive certainly is faster. Some days when that receipt is handed to me, I wonder what would happen if I just reverted back and slowly (and more legibly) printed my name.


and


Mixed Pieces

So I didn’t score three goals in one game. I know, shocking. My parents let it slip at dinner, casually, like assassins knifing a target at night. Except we're in one of those movies where the hired killers really are capable of human emotions and they become the protagonists; however, they are then given the task of dispatching a target they should care about, but, unfortunately its too late, they’ve been in the business too long (I’m now 23). insert thought that this paragraph needs to be rewritten...will work on it.

“Oh, isn’t that funny, Justin really didn’t score three goals in one game. Get this- We let him! We told little Noah to just step aside and let the ball roll by.”

The cheaters mention it off hand, like I have always been in on the plot. I bet you knew about it. Everyone was in on it, friends and parents alike, even my 13 year old sister remembers the momentous event 7 years preconception.

I was destroyed. A family dinner on vacation in the tranquil Caribbean had turned toxic. For years, in class introductions this was my proudest moment. You know, tell us something about yourself- well, I once scored three goals in one indoor soccer game on my third birthday. No [censored], one game!? This was before I learned what a hat trick is.
Are no records sacred? What about my 20 goal season-most definitely tainted. It’s a good thing I no longer know where that trophy is kept because I would do something crazy with it, like try to light it on fire. Are those cheap little league trophies even flammable?? When they melt do they release some poison gas? Good, [censored] it. Or maybe I’ll give it to some other poor kid and tell him he earned it. I’ll find some brain damaged Discovery Health kid with amnesia and convince him that he was amazing, unbelievable, the best indoor soccer player in the 3-5 yr old league. I suppose I could have realized how absolutely absurd it was that my third and final goal went from mid field (or maybe even from our own team’s goal) untouched the length of the gym.
I still have that memory. I can still see the white walled gym filled with children and cheering parents.

It’s not my earliest memory. I can remember the Challenger explosion, unpolluted. The living room was light: big windows and skylights, white furniture, off-white carpet. We were at a get together, maybe even a party. I was laying face forward on some ottoman, watching over and over and over the damned explosion. I looked it up to be sure, January 1986, I was only two. The footage in my mind is played out on a big screen, the screen all powder blue with that lonely, isolated shuttle. It doesn’t even move; it’s frozen in the middle of the picture; how the hell can it fly if it’s not even moving?! As if to answer, it incinerates. And then it reappears as the network replays the tragedy.

Now what’s left for me to brag about at introductions? What do I write under “most interesting fact” or “greatest accomplishment?” My parents say I was unbelievable at puzzles. That they would dump out several puzzles on the floor at once and mix up the pieces and I could do it all in seconds. I could put the doors and windows back up on the haunted house, covering all the ghosts and black cats. I was doing puzzles before I could walk.

Later, I was the best checkers player in the third grade. The certificate hung on the bulletin board in my room above my desk until we moved right before the 7th grade. That’s something, but seriously, checkers? [censored] checkers, checkers is to chess what arm wrestling is to, well, real wrestling. No more physical accomplishments left for me, only puzzles and checkers to remember with pride.

Not like my brother. One time, on the Galaxy Lift, my father in a flash of daring bet us both one hundred dollars (I know, that’s like a whole sega genesis!), that we couldn’t beat him to the bottom of the run. There was no ready…set…go, no starting gates. He just gave us a backwards shove and took off straight from the chairlift chair. The two of us regrouped at the crest of the slope.

“Is he serious??” I was scared.
“Shut up and go!”

That’s the difference between me and my brother. I went fast, but it would be a lie to say I went as fast as possible. I turned every now and then, checked my balance, and tried to maintain some semblance of actually skiing. He on the other hand, took off like a bobsled, like a meteor set for impact with that chairlift line. I could see the people frightened; it did not complex physics simulations for them to discern that a nice night at Bristol Mountain was about to be marked by tragedy as some eighty pounder with skis vaporizes a geographically insignificant mountain into a crater. He beat my dad. He survived to collect our reward.

I could have lived with that defeat; I mean Jonathan never scored three goals in one game. Even thinking about it, writing about it, makes me a bit nauseous. Every breath has become ineffectual. There is a term for this, dyspnea, and I suffer from it chronically. It’s comparable to when you miss dinner and you should be hungry, but nothing sounds appetizing. This has become my natural state, antsy, unsatisfied.


Ill post some more thoughts on these later but will just say I personally like the first piece better, more innocent, the second was born out of just spewing [censored] onto msword, needs some more work, and has too much hostility and bitterness, not really me.

Thanks in advance.

-JP