(After a ((very) long) hiatus), I’m back! Not planning on being the foolhardy youth of months past and promise daily posts again, but I’m hoping to be writing more regularly in this new *~post-collegiate~* phase of life.

[I’d be remiss to neglect the following mention:] Inspiration for the story that broke my dry spell comes incidentally courtesy of a band named Wet:

https://soundcloud.com/wet/youre-the-best

Check it out, along with the rest of their stuff… they’re pretty sweet!

(Also, a shout-out to Ida! Your friendly nudges provided much-needed impetus. Thanks girl!)

Intuition

It’s funny how, for the most momentous days in your life – or at least for the ones where life takes the most drastic turns – you wake up thinking it’s just another day. Brush your teeth, hum a little tune while getting dressed. Fry an egg, or maybe pour a bowl of cereal. Positively ordinary, just like the one before it. By the end of the day, you’re looking back and saying “could that really have been today? Didn’t I feel even the tiniest hint of premonition?” But you know that you didn’t. That morning was just another morning… until it wasn’t anymore.

We hadn’t a clue when we walked out of that freezer room that we had stepped into a new era. While we had been stocking the day’s shipment in the belly of the Jewel Osco beast, sonic warfare raged outside, wiping out anything with an eardrum (or two, as the case tends to be). We would have died instantly as well, had the freezer room not been 100% soundproof.

A lucky break for us, to be sure. But as we walked through the aisles, it became very clear that we were the exception, not the rule. Body after body hunched against shelves or flopped on the off-white tile floor like so many sacks of potatoes. They would have simply looked asleep (or sedated, for those in the more awkward positions) were it not for the blood dripping out of their ears, eyes, noses…

“What the hell…. What happened here”, uttered Derek in shock.

“…too early to tell, I guess,” I heard myself respond, as if from afar.

“Should we, uh, get back to the freezer?” he said, turning to me, eyes wide open now.

“No; it’s over… whatever it is.” I replied.

To this day, I have no idea how I could speak with such certainty about the matter: the Catastrophe was so different from anything I had experienced before. But I knew it was over all the same. That knowledge came from a place seated too deep to warrant anything short of the most ardent conviction. Perhaps it was the adrenalin, or some sort of sixth sense; whatever the cause, I felt in my very bones that the Catastrophe was complete, the instigators’ twisted mission accomplished. And I knew that Derek was the only person I had ever met who was still alive.

3: The Woebegone Bike (Part 2)

“Oh, dang, he really stripped ya good, didn’he,” the bike mechanic commented. The biker feigned a smile. “Well, the trouble is ya missing yar gears, that’s where it’s gunna cost ya. Between the back tire, the gears, the seat, and installation costs, yar looking at a hefty sum. Sorry to say’t, but yar better off replacing ‘er altogether.”

A pit formed in the biker’s stomach; memories flashed through his head as if he were clicking his way through them on an arcane Kodak slide projector.

Summertime rides pedaling aimlessly around the lake…

The trek to Chinatown (how sweet the bubble tea had tasted that day)…

And, above all, the countless times the bike had saved his ass, shuttling him from home to work to class and back faster than walking or even the irregular buses ever could have.

We had a good run, he thought, looking at the bike’s sorry remains. He rested his hand on the steering wheel as if he were a father gripping his son’s shoulder for the very last time, and turned back to the mechanic. “Alright, thanks, man. I’ll just leave it with you then, if you’ve got any use for the parts,” he said, attempting nonchalance.

“Sure thing, kid, I’ll put ’em to use. Ya have a good’un now.” The mechanic said with a nod that suggested he had sensed the biker’s wistfulness and sympathized. The biker smiled, leaned the bike against the nearest wall, and without so much as a glance back, he was off.

3: The Woebegone Bike (Part 1)

A frame with a front wheel. That’s all it was at this point. He brought it into the shop the next day, dutifully carrying the cobalt blue shell the eight blocks from his apartment to the bike shop. That trek had felt a helluva lot shorter last time, when the bike had been carrying him, he mused.

Deeen-doooon. A sing-song bell heralded his arrival as the spring-loaded door swung shut, and, sure enough, a moment later, a tall man with massive, grease-covered hands emerged. “What can I do for ya?” he said with a matter-of-fact look.

“Hi. Yeah… so I left my bike locked by the front tire and frame to a lamppost the other night, and woke up with it in this state. I was wondering whether you might be able to give me a price quote for how much it’d be to get it back to normal,” I responded.

(Ran out of time… To be continued tomorrow)

2: [Untitled piece inspired by a rant overheard on the Blue Line]

“Son, where do you want to live?” rasped the woman, turning in her two chairs to face the passenger behind her. He, a pasty twenty-something as skinny as his mother was fat, paused for only a moment before answering:

“Maybe somewhere out West. California would be alright. But not L.A., it’s too Hollywood. San Francisco’s for artists and gays, San Diego’s too Sea World-y. So I guess not California. Washington and Oregon would be okay, if they weren’t so desolate. Seattle would be the exception I guess, except it’s too ~free-trade~, ugh. The Midwest is boring. Texas has the death penalty; I can read, so I can’t live in Mississippi; I’m not a racist, so that’s a ‘no’ to Alabama and Georgia. Florida’s for old people, Cubans, and party girls. I don’t smoke, so that rules out the Carolinas, and I have teeth, so not Appalachia.”

The deafening woosh of the train through the tunnel prompted him to pause, but he quickly resumed as the automated voice of the CTA announced “This is Montrose. This is a blue line train to Forest Park.”

Never a dull ride on the CTA.

“Baltimore would be okay, if it weren’t so damn dangerous. Any place that describes itself as “for lovers” is out of the question, so there goes Virginia. D.C. is a political circle jerk. Pennsylvania just plain rubs me the wrong way. Massachussetts is full of Massholes and moron academics. Vermont is for hippies, and New Hampshire and Maine are too outdoorsy. Connecticut and Jersey are for commuters. I guess New York would be okay, but Manhattan has a stick up its ass, Brooklyn is for dirty hipsters, the Bronx is… the Bronx. Everyone hates Staten Island, so not there. I guess that leaves Queens. I don’t know how I feel about Queens.”

Without another word, he leaned back in his seat, and she turned to face forward again.

1: Attempting Motivation (A.M.)

The detested jingle of her iPhone alarm jogged her to reluctant wakedness in the chilly daylit bedroom. She buried herself deeper in blankets, tucking the puffy comforter snuggly under both her sides. After more than a few snoozings from within the human burrito, she forced herself into some semblance of alertness. There’s no time like the present. Casting the heavy duvet away with a resounding shove, she slid out of bed quickly so there wouldn’t be a chance to reconsider. With three light-footed steps across the cold floor, she arrived at the stubborn bronze knob, which she gave a few twists to the left. Perfect, now I’ll have no trouble getting up when it’s a little warmer. Mission accomplished, she promptly barricaded herself under the comforter once more, and closed her eyes again, to better plan out what she would wear that day, or so she told herself.

The culprit.

New Year’s resolutions. most of us make ’em, most of us break ’em. But as I look forward to 2014 — and back at a long list of botched past resolutions (quitting nail biting, giving up junk food, working out 6 days a week… how I wish the list didn’t go on, but it does…) — I can’t help but be filled with the hope (naïve though it may be) that this time around, it will be different.

Why? Well, mostly because I’m hoping to depend on one bad habit (my chronic procrastination) to enable what I think will be a good one*. I gave up on killing my procrastinatorial bent long ago. I tried, it felt wrong, and I’ve since moved on to trying to tame the beast rather than maime the beast. In my quest to domesticate my inner procrastinator-wildling, I’ve learned (1) to set firm limits on the extent of procrastination I will permit, and adhere to them, and (2) to productivastinate.

Productivastination consists simply of avoiding an undesired task by doing slightly less undesired but also necessary ones. Need to avoid studying for a midterm? Might as well clean my room. Want to justify putting off Wednesday’s math pset? I guess it’s time to write that cover letter. (As a matter of fact, in writing this very blog post, I am productivastinating to the max on an assignment that was already due…. >.>)

And so, in adding this task to that daily list of productivastinationary activities, I have hope that it’ll actually get done. As an extra safe-guard, I’m posting my pieces to a blog (ayo), so that I’ll feel the harsh glare of the Panopticon’s judgment when I shirk my self-imposed commitment. Oh, right, I forgot to mention what the resolution was… that might help:

*The Resolution: To write a short piece of fiction every day and post it to this blog. I will aim to spend five minutes per piece, and will cut myself off (regardless of the pathetic-excuse-of-a-story’s sorry state) after fifteen.

**The Revised resolution: weekly updates. Because- let’s be real here- daily updates may have seemed a nice notion whilst curled up fireside over Winter Break, but in the harsh light of collegiate reality seem foolhardy at best.

A NYE party with kazoos is my kind of  fête.

[How this blog came to be, more generally]

Taking predominantly quantitative courses throughout the past two years has been an invigorating experience, and I would do it again, were this YOLOer given that opportunity. It has sharpened my analytical thinking, strengthened my ability to reason, left me with a range of technical skills, and made me a better problem solver.

But every so often, I do feel a frustration that, while I analyze and solve, I don’t create. I’m a consumer of knowledge, but by no means a producer of anything novel. And I fear that, though I may be developing as a thinker, I’m not maturing as a writer.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to push myself to write regularly, but lacked the discipline or direction. I thought that having a blog might provide enough of an illusion that I’m writing for a readership, which could potentially motivate putting a pen to paper, so to speak.

And while this addressed the discipline hurdle (at least to some degree), I remained directionally challenged; that is to say, I wasn’t sure what I would want to write about. I knew that it shouldn’t be about me, because my life oscillates between the boring and the embarrassing, with tragically little in-between. I toyed with political/economic/cultural commentary, but decided that to do it right (or at least try to) would take more time than I was willing to commit.

And then, I happed upon this article. Devilishly short, deviously decadent holiday season fictions. Now that is something for which I have the time and attention span (I think). (Granted, these shorts were written by America’s greats, but, hey, this is ‘Murica, I can give it a crack too if I want to, Goddammit.) And maybe people would have the attention span to read them, too, who knows.

My attempts at this style more often than not will exceed the two sentences of the impressively compact tales above. I fear that if I limit myself to a couple of sentences, the French rule-bender in me might become even more of a run-on rambler (and after reading The Unvanquished, I’m a firm believer that Willy Faulks wrote enough long sentences to last the English language many more moons). So, I’m limiting myself in time instead. Fifteen minutes and it’s going up, embarrassingly rough and lacking in plot or character development as it may (and, most likely, will) be.

But I’m looking forward to a lot of the possibilities this new genre should open up, namely, the chance to create noncommittally. Each week will usher in a new opportunity to ‘play the field’: to dream up even zanier characters and ditch them without guilt, to devise an absurd pretext or a mundane setting and flakily never follow up on it again.

So, without further ado, welcome to my pet proj, Five Minute Fictions! Happy browsings, and the best of tidings to you in the New Year.