Gnomes! Gnomes in my laptop again!
I was crashing around in my old files just now trying to determine what still qualified as a viable WIP and which ones could be retired to the scrap-heap and have found all sorts of surprises. First, there was this one little A-Team story that was actually coming along quite nicely, which is gone. As in, 'opened the file and there was nothing inside' gone. D-:
And then I opened a file that I was sure only had a one sentence plot notion in it and there was actually a whole little 250-word blurb that I honestly couldn't even remember writing! I know I'll write things while drunk on occasion, but that's just ridiculous. No memory of it whatsoever! And it's, uh, actually pretty good too, despite a epically goofy name which I probably thought was wicked cool at the time.
So, to round off February,
*
Maybe we never talked about what Blake Delaney and his gang did to us back then because we just didn’t know the word for it yet.
‘Bullying’ wasn’t quite right, with its implications of atomic wedgies and pilfered lunch money. Bullying… or rather to be bullied… was something juvenile and ultimately harmless that you should’ve grown out of ages back. It also had the unfortunate effect of casting the person it was inflicted upon as a victim, when in reality you were probably just a guy trying to get to class, trying to get through life, sometimes even being brave and stoic in the face of Delaney’s tender mercies.
‘Harassment’ was even worse - a tidy, sterile word with the nasty connotation that you had or were going to take your grievances to the principal. Start throwing around ‘harassment’ and, boy, you deserved just about everything you got handed to you.
You couldn’t say that they picked on us, or ‘pestered’, or ‘bothered’. Those were all too mild. Our conversations remained vague, always leaving the worst bits unspoken.
Another sunrise of a black eye, blood on your mouth.
‘Delaney again?’
A grim nod.
And that was that.
I had a couple years of university under my belt and had long since left Delaney in my life’s rearview mirror when I finally determined the word that had been right all along. Turns out, adults did it too. Hell, they wrote books about it.
What we had been talking about, in the silent space between the subtle question and the shuttered nod, was terrorism.
*
And then I opened a file that I was sure only had a one sentence plot notion in it and there was actually a whole little 250-word blurb that I honestly couldn't even remember writing! I know I'll write things while drunk on occasion, but that's just ridiculous. No memory of it whatsoever! And it's, uh, actually pretty good too, despite a epically goofy name which I probably thought was wicked cool at the time.
So, to round off February,
*
Maybe we never talked about what Blake Delaney and his gang did to us back then because we just didn’t know the word for it yet.
‘Bullying’ wasn’t quite right, with its implications of atomic wedgies and pilfered lunch money. Bullying… or rather to be bullied… was something juvenile and ultimately harmless that you should’ve grown out of ages back. It also had the unfortunate effect of casting the person it was inflicted upon as a victim, when in reality you were probably just a guy trying to get to class, trying to get through life, sometimes even being brave and stoic in the face of Delaney’s tender mercies.
‘Harassment’ was even worse - a tidy, sterile word with the nasty connotation that you had or were going to take your grievances to the principal. Start throwing around ‘harassment’ and, boy, you deserved just about everything you got handed to you.
You couldn’t say that they picked on us, or ‘pestered’, or ‘bothered’. Those were all too mild. Our conversations remained vague, always leaving the worst bits unspoken.
Another sunrise of a black eye, blood on your mouth.
‘Delaney again?’
A grim nod.
And that was that.
I had a couple years of university under my belt and had long since left Delaney in my life’s rearview mirror when I finally determined the word that had been right all along. Turns out, adults did it too. Hell, they wrote books about it.
What we had been talking about, in the silent space between the subtle question and the shuttered nod, was terrorism.
*