On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

This is like imposing a deadline on myself. As long as I know this space is here waiting for me, I have to post something everyday and that makes me work work work on the story. I don't really want to post something like: "I'm trying, but nothing is coming out." Which is what I started to do many times today. My two readers and 1000 spambots might get tired of posts like that very quickly. Written on two bags of Cheez-It, here is the latest fragment.

That last sentence would drive my 12th grade English teacher crazy. She was great and I loved her. Of course, I didn't write today's frag directly onto two bags of Cheez-It. Two bags of Cheez-It was my fuel, my food, my calorie source that supplied the energy while I was writing today's frag. High school English teachers are our friends.

I learned something interesting today. While using the word "linchpin", I kept wanting to spell it "lynchpin". But lynchpin sounds like something the KKK hands out at some kind of milestone ceremony, so I figured linchpin must be the right spelling. But, of course, since I'm anal that way, I double-checked the spelling. And guess what: you can spell it either way. Just like judgment and judgement.

For obvious reasons, I'm sticking with linchpin.

Days are months and I am spending more time alone in the shop, a place for odd pairings. It is organized only for those who know what they need in the moment they need it, but for those who wander in to look around curiously, the place is a nightmare. And that’s when my day excites me. On the shelves, in a bin, under useless crap is the exact thing that a person has been missing, causing his life to stall or falter or fall, and it’s my job to help him find it. It’s a common object, clandestine in its real purpose: a screwdriver, a pen, ceramic mug or wire whisk. It’s the object that moves with a person from house to house, childhood to adulthood, that rattles in the kitchen cabinet, toolbox, or junk drawer, always present before or after a purge. We all have one, this linchpin that holds it all together, and once it’s lost, our lives trip end over end until it’s found.

In Ellery’s shop, the girl who was caught in a whopper of a lie by her mother and, seemingly unrelated to the lie, is known soon after as the redhead who hands out on demand orgasmic jobs to the high school football team when it was really just that one stupid boy that one stupid time comes in looking for her peso that is no longer rolling around in her desk drawer at home. She and I find it under a stack of early Hustler relatively quickly.

The father who has yet to learn the difference between being a bad parent and accusations by his three fucked up children of being a bad parent wanders into the shop having no idea why he’s there. His linchpin, which I know to be a silver button off a long ago jacket that belonged to his mother, is safely at home in a box on his top closet shelf. He is kind of shuffling down each aisle, confused about why the motor oil is next to the pain relievers, rebuffing my offers of help with a very sad just looking, thanks. He pauses briefly at the stack of Hustler magazines, I hold in a giggle, he walks out empty-handed. He didn’t need to be in here anyway.