Here I am again, in the sandbox, writing. God knows I’ve done my best to avoid doing it because I’m so damn afraid of shit actually doing something with it, like motherfucking enjoying it. Wait stop let’s go in to that fear, unearth it like a fossil, dust ir off and try to be so scared.
My earliest memory of writing.
I don’t really have one. I mean, like every kid I learn to do it in kindergarten and practiced like every kid. I think it was fourth grade, though, where I spent my spare time (jeez was it fifth grade?) writing a story about the characters from the video game Gauntlet. I remember telling my peers that I had “written myself into a corner” as if that was something cool to do. But I remember I was trying to create my own story and that’s the important part.
The fifth grade poem
Mr. Roman wasn’t my teacher, but he was a cool guy. He was next door and we went over there for story time. We had assignments to wrote a poem and I wrote one with the opening lines “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” Not too original, I know, but the rest was pretty decent. Mr. Roman read it aloud to the class and they liked it. He didn’t tell them who wrote it until afterwards. I felt pretty good about that.
So everything I’ve said so far is not out of the ordinary, or even interesting. But keep reading.
Eighth grade, a turning point
Can you imagine an essay on lockers winning a school-wide writing contest? That’s a pretty fucking mundane subject if you ask me. But I won the contest. It was announced over the school-wide intercom in the morning to the whole school. I got a body shock when I heard the news because my life was pretty shitty at the time due to … well that’s another story. Anyway I got called to the office to claim my prize — a $500 U.S. savings bond (or was it $50?). They needed my social security number in order to issue it to me so I called stepmother to give it to me. The bitch was livid. She was pissed that I won something. I got the number though, and the savings bond, but that was confiscated later and I never recovered it.
That shit crushed me, I’m embarrassed to say it crushed me for 25 years. And I’m writing this right now with the intent to cast it away.
So go away, evil memory. You have no power over me. I own my voice and I’m going to use it.
Other wise I’ll just die and I’m not going let that shit happen anytime, like ever.