Shift
Or rather an excerpt of it...
Time is meaningless, and yet everything…
I couldn’t tell you when I initially wrote this, at least a decade ago would be my guesstimate, maybe pre-2014 before my son was born, I’m not entirely sure and since Dropbox is slowly self-deleting content from my bloated account (5.7GB in a 2GB storage space), I lost the exact date it was uploaded but thankfully saved it to my laptop before it got nixed from existence. As I look over this piece I dubbed Shift, I don’t think a single other soul ever perused a single sentence of it before this moment but the encouragement of Troubles to throw it up brought me to this moment.
I recall having the notion of playing with multiple narration types in a single story as I built towards them blurring into one but not being really sure what the story was going to be when I started. I just started writing/typing and over the course of many sessions, this Shift was born. Does it work? I don’t know, I suppose I’d have to offer up the full piece for someone else to see how they feel. As for my own opinion, reading it over for the first time in years, I’m at least interested in what I was attempting to do.
For the moment, here are two sections with each featuring the different style I tried to take…
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12:22PM
So I was staring into the mirror and thinking to myself that this hardly the most interesting way to kick off my story but they do say things about making characters relatable, about bringing out the elements everybody can recognize and find something to identify with.
Apparently that’s writing 101, or so I’m told...hell if I know the truth.
Actually you know what; I do know the truth...
We don’t want the truth of our lives; we don’t want to read about this...
(Picture a man sitting in his cubicle typing away on his PC…)
We want to read about THIS...
(Now picture some sort of sexual congress)
We don’t want to go to the movie and see this...
(Imagine a woman standing in line at the bank)
We want THIS!
(Now think about that woman and her gang robbing the bank)
Every day life is boring, stupid and it is the absolute last thing any of us want to see when we click on the idiot box or open up our browsers or do the forbidden and actually pick up a hard copy of a book and read.
Do you want to see me shave right now? I don’t even want to watch me shave right now!
Do you want to stay with me while I drop my pants, squat down on the toilet, and proceed to stink up my apartment for the next seven minutes while I read through the next chapter of whatever book happens to be sitting here?
No I highly doubt you do when I have no desire to have to suffer through that myself...
- - - - - - - - - - -
Jonathan: What…the hell…is this?
Maria: You tell us.
Jonathan: It’s almost like I wrote this but…
Detective 2: But what?
Jonathan: But not quite. I mean my bank was robbed a few years ago while I was working but the crook didn’t chicken out. It was a woman leading a few guys and the cops…well it ended in a gun fight, highway chase, something straight out of Hollywood…the woman got arrested, one of her guys was killed, the other two got away.
Maria: Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell….
Jonathan: Well the picture attached in here is the one pulled from our cameras; the news used it at first until they got a clearer image.
Detective 2: What about that other picture? The pornographic one…is that familiar?
Jonathan: No, not in the slightest I… did my lights just flicker?
Maria: I didn’t notice anything. How about you Joanne?
Joanne: No…lights are fine. Mr. Richards, do you have any idea where any of this would be coming from?
Jonathan: No, I pay my bills…aside from just this minute I’ve never seen my lights flicker once and for all I know that could just be the power of suggestion playing tricks on me. I haven’t applied for a new job in years, I haven’t gotten shut off notices and I most definitely would not be writing about any of it on my computer if I had!
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Do I post more? Do I share the entire thing? I have a recollection of exploring a self-pub at the time, even going so far as to set-up an ISBN number, but I stalled out, probably for the usual self-sabotaging reasons comprised of fears and anxieties. What to do? What to do?