Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Peril of Ancient File Folders


As part of the annual mid-summer "we gotta
get rid of some of this crap” campaign by the love of my life, I cleaned out my office. While going through my file cabinet, which has probably lingered untouched for the best part of twenty years, I found all kinds of interesting/nostalgic/embarrassing stuff. Back in the day that I believed I’d be the next John Steinbeck (Or at least Freddy Steinbeck his less talented cousin), I wrote all manner of literature/ noodling/inane drivel.

Here’s one such for your appraisal/scrutiny/testing of your gag reflex. It’s instructive of what happens when you combine a bored writer, a word processor and an abundance of free time.



















I sat down to write an epic poem
You know the kind, something Beowulfesque and
Gilgameshic, an adventure odder than the odyssey and
Iller than the Illiad, a tale filled with grandeur and
pathos on a glorious scale, preferably featuring
Vikings storming a Norman castle, flinging
explosive clumps of pyrotechnic peat moss over
moat encircled stone walls. Think “The Song of Roland”
being lip synched by a cover band.
“Ayeeeeee!!! I’m on fire!!!!” the cry would fly from the circling serfs and
pandemonious peons whose faux pas was zigging
when they should have been zagging. “Ayeeeee!!!”

Or, perhaps the saga could chronicle the exploits of a
sleek-cheeked Nubian princess, gyrating a voluptuous hootchie-coo and
curling her finger to summon a drooling sheik and as he
zooms in like a moth to a flame neatly plunging a dagger into his heaving breast, payback for an earlier transgression like failing to leave
a sufficient tip or calling her “babe!”

So, I prepared. Made time to rhyme, stacking up reams of clean white paper and laying out cups of bitter dark coffee and my trusty thesaurus; I set out
accompanied by Miriam Webster, the Sancho
Panza to my impossible literary dream-seeking Donny Quixote.

Infused by my muse and
Inspired by my aspirations I
Squeezed my eyes tightly closed
Vowing to not reopen them until my
masterpiece appeared, fully realized
on the screen. My fingers lingered over the keys as I
let the words flutter out of my brain like
so many frenzied birds escaping a just opened cage.

An hour passed and then two which spiraled into a third.
Fulfilling my promise to myself, I dared not peek and
behold the molten metaphors and throbbing narrative that
flowed like red hot lava from the Vesuvius of my
roiling mind. The clatter of keys and the drumbeat of the
vast armies I’d created joined the siren song of a
galaxy of nymphs and the grunts and roars of the
strange and wonderful creatures becoming
the soundtrack to my fever dream philosophizing.

In a flurry I combined iambic whatever-ameter with
great swoops of onomatopoeia, tongue tantalizing
alliteration and certainly a healthy dose of symbolic
polygamy spiced with a dash of lateral lyricism.
Nouns, verbs, past and present participles and malodorous
modifiers were flung from my fingertips onto
the waiting pages of the virgin Word document,
a future classic destined to be required reading for
a platoon of semi-snoozing high school sophomores.

Finally, as the morning sun beamed through my
office window I applied the thundering climax to my
magnum Opie, the fruit of my all-night encounter with
the divine and mischievous. I detected a sound at my elbow and opened my
eyes to the sight of my worldly muse examining
my sprawling masterpiece, my piece de something, something. (Hey, I was exhausted, I’d emptied the tank of my voluminous vocabulary).

“Very nice” my wife crooned and smiled and patted the top
Of my still humming head. “But, think how much more smoothly it might have
read, had you started with your index fingers over the F and J instead of the G and H.