Last year Joel and Aimee had a Forgotten English page-a-day calendar filled with definitions for words like shloof (16 March: flat feet), aproneer (09 May: a shopkeeper; a tradesman), snake's-stang (05 March: dragonfly), ,em>glox (23 March: the sound of liquids when shaken in a barrel), and loupy-dyke (31 May: a term of contempt conjoining the ideas of imprudence and waywardness). These words seem like Balderdash words.

(Balderdash aside: while playing the game on New Year's Eve, we got the word woopknacker (an aggressive loud-mouthed person). To Jeremy's chagrin, we all decided that he was a woopknacker. We thought we were funny, but he was unimpressed.)

For a few months, the Mirons were saving their Forgotten English pages for me. At some point I decided to write a short story using these words (in chronological order based on the date each appeared in the calendar). I didn't get far.

'Twas in that wilking [04 Feb: drunken] hour when sodden men stagger homeward, spirits swilking [ibid. swilking is the noise made by a liquid in a partially-filled vessel] merrily inside them, that Herrick stumbled upon the body. From the end of the row [ed: row of what?] the bell-man's [05 Feb: a guardina of the night] mumbled song seeped into the street. No light shone upon the avenue. The wee hours clung to the city and Herrick, inebriated, was tripped headlong by a corpse in the road.

Herrick's first instinct was to rise with fists poised to fight. "Come on then, ya drunken fool," he slurred, poking the body with his boot. "Have at it," he taunted, but the body made no response.

To Herrick, a mass of involuntary motion himself, the body writhed in a most peculiar fashion; its inhabitant seemed demon-haunted.

When his shouting provoked no rebuke, and when further prodding (subsequently turned to outright assault with the point of his boot) proved equally fruitless, Herrick began to realize the body before him might have already yielded its more metaphysical mass to the world beyond.

He let out a stifled shriek, a chortle, a cry of slurred alarm.

In his thirty-two years on the Earth he'd seen but one dead body previous. His great-uncle, a daunting octogenarian, had bequeathed a monthly sum to Herrick on the provision that the youth live with, and care for, his great-aunt Dora. She was a frightful woman, devoid of half her wit, or more, but whilst he waited for a pair of dead-men's shoes [06 Feb: property which cannot be claimed until after the decease of the present holder], Herrick was compelled to render his best service in support of her. This cousin-Betty [07 Feb: a deranged woman] made his life hellish with her babbling and her freakish behavior.

The point was moot. Great-Uncle David, at the age of eighty-three, developed a taste for the dice, and he squandered his fortune in back-alleys and at inns of ill-repute. He died happily, double sixes thrown from his pale and penniless palm.

Great-Uncle David's bankrupture [08 Feb: bankruptcy] left Herrick without an inheritance, and with little motivation to care for the demented Dora. He moved from her cottage, moved as far as he could from her, move, in fact, to London where his sorrows were obscured by the satisfaction of the pints.

Before him now, though -- cold and growing colder was the body of a man he did not know. In his state, he could think of naught but to shout until the bell-man hastened to his side.

And that's all I wrote.

I don't remember writing these few paragraphs, but then I never remember writing any of the bits that I find buried on my desk, tucked beneath the seat of my car, stuck between pages of the books I read. But they're there, and in my handwriting. Some of them are story ideas. Some are character sketches. (Here's one now, tucked on the corner of this desk: "Character: this person's job (which he/she considers drudgery of the highest order) is to develop the back-cover blurbs for books." I know when I wrote that, though: on Sunday the fifth I transcribed the back-cover blurbs from approximately sixty book group books. They're uniformly awful. Out of the sixty, maybe two were something other than publishing hype.) Other pieces are poems or, more likely, fragments of poems.

In my filing cabinet I have a thick file filled with these aborted attempts at creative writing. My file of actual completed pieces is much smaller. I tell myself I don't have time to write, that I'm out of practice and no longer have the ability to write creatively. Deep inside, I know I'm lying to myself. I make time to write in this weblog four or five times each week. And I know I have some poor writing habits (overuse of clichés, too many superlatives, poor proof-reading, a penchant for the dramatic (which leads to exclamation points!), etc.), but this awareness is the first step to being able to self-edit.

I really should do some creative writing.

Sometime.

Soon?

Maybe after I finish writing this weblog entry...

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Mac Zealot   At this point, though, it seems likely that my Mac zealotry will yield its first fruit, that Jeff will join the cult.

2004 — The Decemberists   While browsing various year-end best lists, I kept finding an album called Her Majesty The Decemberists by The Decemberists. A search of the iTunes Music Store yielded said album, and a casual listen of the sample clips was promising, so I downloaded it. But I didn't listen to it. Last night as I set up my new G5, I chose to listen to the Decemberists on a whim. My god! Here is music so perfect it made me cry.

2002 — My web sites are back!   My web sites are back! My web sites are back!