On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

I am the queen of complete reversal. Forget my plan of drafting in my journal. I discovered it's easier to just type directly into Word, blue screens of death be damned. So it looks like this space will be the only permanent record of the drafts and edits of the piece, and I guess that's okay, just something else for me to get used to.

Back in the day, it was impossible for me to write in the middle of distraction. I had to be in a room by myself, no phone, no TV, no uninvited visitors. Background music was fine, but it had to be instrumental European classical, no words. What a difference a decade makes. It is now not a problem to write with email popping up, answering the email, visitors stopping by. And the background music: Morcheeba featuring Kool Mo Dee on one song, Slick Rick on another. Kool Mo Dee is my partner in subtle change, it seems, since he took the time to alter the spelling of his name from Kool Moe Dee for whatever reason. Maybe he was trying to fit the whole name on his license plate or something. One letter can and does make the difference sometimes.

But, anyway, here's to a first draft continuation...

I ask Ellery how he knows cool cat Gramps. I ask, but I know. I know this the same way I know everything about certain people I meet. Their lives fold out in front of me a page at a time. I knew next to nothing about my mother even though, after sixteen years, we’d been together for over half her life. I knew nothing of my father since, I guess, his life choices weren’t about meeting me twice. As I sweep, I close my eyes and listen to Ellery and his smoker’s rasp tell the story that began fifty years before I was born when Ellery and cool cat Gramps were young boys.

By accident, my laughter at one part of the story sounds too much like I’m very familiar with it, and I catch myself. Ellery barely notices, though, and keeps talking, dismissing my yeah, I know exactly what happens next with his own but you’re too young to know anything about that, aintcha, boy? No point explaining, I’ve learned, that our experiences are universal and I may not have been with him on that particular street corner on that particular day, but, shit, we’ve all had best friends fuck us over. My universe speech gets lost, anyway, in the overall possibility that I just might have been there with him that day almost seventy years ago. Because how I know all this shit about these people, I haven’t quite figured out, yet. I was out of school more than I was in school at some point and maybe metaphysics was covered on one of the days I was out getting my ass kicked by my 103-pound mama.