Creative Writing for kicks

Anyone care to write onto this?

Every now and then, I feel a welling up inside. That's the best way to describe it. I never know what will happen if I open up a mental spigot and allow things to flow. Sometimes it's music, and sometimes it's something like the following. Abe Cubbage once recommended an author named Tom Robbins to me, (something I've been very grateful about ever since) and after reading back the following "beginning" to my wife, I think I figured out why Abe thought I'd like Mr. Robbins' work. I can't really touch the talent of a Tom Robbins, but this was a lot of fun anyway, so in the interest of stirring your own creative soup, if any of you readers care to, continue the story, or if you don't, I'll probably get around to it before never

Cheers,
Ock

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I had made it halfway down Rosemont Drive before I realized I had left my wallet on the table at the Applebee's restaurant where I had just had a chicken finger club sandwich, fries, and a raspberry tea. As I looked for a place to turn around, it started to rain.

Normally, I like the rain, but during the steamy summers, the afternoon showers come out of celestial showerheads with each hole the size of a basketball so that even a five minute downpour can leave stray dogs swimming down Canal Street like drowning rats. This looked to be a ten-minuter if I knew my rain.

The sudden cooling of the air outside the car was causing me to fog up, and the daily deluge made it hard to see as it was, so I pulled over to the side of the road. When the rain slackened some, I saw that just up ahead was the cleared area of a construction site where I might find room to turn around. The site was nothing but levelled dirt. Whatever was to be built here hadn't quite started, and most of what had been torn down seemed to have been hauled away. I watched the rain turn the area into a red mud river which ran in streamlets out onto the freshly scoured asphalt of the road and trickled away down the hill with what seemed more purpose than simple gravity could explain. My internal stream of consciousness flowed along with the rivulets of red dirt. Streams...rivers...jungles...snakes...hisssss. "Hissss?"

Yes hissss. I heard a distinct hissing sound, like a snake.

Do you ever have those moments where you know intellectually that there is no way a certain thing is possible, but your subconscious isn't offering anything better and so your imagination fills in the blanks with absurdity? There's no way a snake could be in my car, but there sure is a snake HISS in my car. How did it get in? Did it slither in when I opened my car door at Applebees sensing with its superkeen snakey animal senses the impending rain?

Maybe I had enemies (I continued to think all of this inside of an instant). That's it! Someone mistook me for an enemy, and they placed a deadly snake in my car hoping that it would bite me thus leaving its dreadful toxin, a poison so virulent that it would cause temors, sweating, shaking, and vomiting (not necessarily in that order) and would culminate in a thankfully quick stilling of my beating heart which of a sudden would seize up and shrivel like a slug sunbathing on a salt lick.

Or what if it wasn't a snake at all!? What if some aliens had landed, and the police were chasing them. And they took their alien baby and tried to hide it in my backseat hoping to give their lives so that their baby could live! (I start giggling at my own inanity at this point and at the further priceless thought that I don't drink alcohol - the consumption of which might explain this sudden double gainer I was doing off the high dive of my hissing imagination into the whumping sound of the waters of consciousness below.)

Wait a minute. Water doesn't make a whumping sound.

Moments later, I understood everything - hissing and whumping alike. Flat tire.

Using my finely honed skills of observation I deduced that I was surmising too late that there might still be some nails around a construction site, and getting out of my car and stepping into some fine red mud to have a look I further deduced with my acute powers of visual awareness that yes, there were in fact some. In fact there were two. Both had been sticking straight into the air from the back of a discarded two by four only moments ago, when as luck would have it they managed a last minute hasty escape from the rainy muddy surroundings of this dead building's final resting place into the cozy, dry heated air of the inside of my tire. What dry heated air remained inside of it, that is, which is to say not much. "Foolhardy nails," I scoffed, using my razor sharp skills of pulling things out of tires, "the joke is on you!" and I flung them away into a crack of lightning as my maniacal laughter dissipated and was lost in the thunder which soon followed.

Not bothering with the irony that I had to step of my own volition into the same rain that the selfish hateful nails had escaped by absolutely pure chance, I reached into the car, pressed the trunk unlatch button under my dashboard, and began rummaging through the piles of junk that were too trashy for the back seat but not trashy enough for the garbage and so had graduated to the level of trunkdom to find the jack and the uh....the um...lug-tool-wrench-thing.

As if to make sure my day was aesthetically complete in every way, what was going to be a ten minute downpour decided on several encore performances. Well, why not when it was on such a roll?

So, it's raining proverbial cats and dogs on me and my car with the game leg in the middle of what is becoming a red clay mush pie with nails hidden in it, and somewhere the fate of my wallet which along with two dollars contained an inestimable value in old Applebee's receipts was laying naked and vulnerable to the prying eyes and fingers of god-knows-who or -what. What could possibly happen next?

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Thank you.

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i enjoyed this. i hope you get around to continuing it.

vanessa/mig XX

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Yes, I do have those moments....

(answer to question in paragraph #5)

Trinitie

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As I promised my dear friend… the pseudo-continuation to your tale…..

It’s always amazed me how a faded slab of leather could be the keeper of so much personal information. Just by prying into it you would know my hair is a mousy brown, that my birthday is the same day you’ll end up getting pinched if you fail to wear green, and that I always eat the same meal, unaccompanied at Applebee’s. I looked down at the unfaithful piece of rubber next to my feet and squinted through the obnoxious rain pellets that bombarded me. Fuck the car; I needed to get my wallet back.

“What if they find out?” I heard them say. They were back, the voices, my constant companions in times of crisis. I was sure I had to retrieve my wallet at any cost.

The whizzing and sloshing of cars as I proceeded on my way drowned the voices into a slow, monotonous hum. I knew they were watching, studying me, wondering. I wrapped my denim jacket tightly around my body. It was no shield from the rain, but I felt safe. I could not let them see my fear. I lowered my head not worrying about the long wet strands of hair that tickled my nose.

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