Archives, Flash for Julienormal in Normal entries

“Hey, honey, I’m home.”
“Oh, hi. How was work?”
“You know, same old same old, killing aliens, blowing shit up, taking kid’s cows for magic beans. Rep from Gamedog showed up today.”
“Yeah, anything good?”
“Dunno, didn’t open it, he said it was for you.”
“Really?”
“Well, he said I bet your girlfriend would like this.”
“I don’t even know the guy.”
“He might have just been coyly asking if I have a girlfriend.”
“Oh. Let me see.”
He hands her the familiar bag, the same logo and weight and colors as the bags he stacks each day for the business, that he wraps games in for kids and send them drooling on their way. In some circles that bag is a mark of honor and courage; of course those circles do include invisible playmates, hackers and geeks.
She unwraps the bag and then the game in a plain white box, the disc has no other markings than one side obviously having been written to.

“Wow, what is this?”
“Still don’t know. Probably a pre-release. Maybe he’s trying to get a cheap control group with game store owners girlfriends.”
“I thought you said he was coy.”
“I didn’t say it’d be a big control group.”
“You mind?” she looked at the game.
“No, go ahead I’m going to shower and scrounge for food.”
“Happy hunting on that one, I think there’s some mustard and a beer, but there could be meals from the ice age buried in the freezer.”
He grunted an appreciative single laugh behind her back. The thing about relationships is you do things to show you’re not taking each other for granted, like laugh at shit that wasn’t funny the first hundred times. He did fight once when he was in a pissy mood “You know you are free to shop for food too” It ended with two hours of them each listing the others faults, an hour of silence during two sit coms, a shared box of wine and make up sex. Plugging the box he had said “At least it doesn’t have a screw cap” She laughed, still, after a year and she called it Chateau Du Cardboard, and he laughed like he’d only heard it fifty times.

He took a long hot shower, day dreaming about winning the lottery, going down on his girlfriend in an igloo and the big soft pretzels with chunks of salt and brown mustard from the cart on Fifth and Market. Toweled off, brushed his teeth, put on some baggy sweats and a fleece his mom had sent for Christmas.

“So, how is it?” He called from the bathroom, steam rolling into the bedroom and kitchen.
“Honey? How’s the game?”
He monkey walked to the game den that was their living room, trying to keep the soft flannel of his sweats from rubbing against his still wet balls.
In her gaming chair was a large Raven with the controller in her yellow beak, on the screen in simple black font on a terra cotta background the words You Lose flashed in a runic sort of rhyme.

Ok, that’s my Friday flash. I guess it’s been a while. Had no idea where it was going or where it came from, though the Poe references at the end weren’t just yanked from the ether. I knew about those when he was in the shower. The thing about flashes is that you don’t have to sweat the end, but you know it’s coming the minute you sit down.

When there were a handful of us playing this game we had a time limit. I’m not sure why, I think it was a built in excuse in case anyone needed to say ‘yeah, sorry, I was rushed.’ I’m not sure I’ve ever taken more than twenty minutes if you count just the writing. It’s like speed chess. My chess game plateaued years ago from neglect, and there’s no better move I’ll discover in two hours that I won’t or can’t make in thirty seconds. This is neither boasting nor bitching; I’m only saying it takes me twenty minutes tops to write one of these. I suppose if I were editing them for submission or writing some serial piece comprised of flash scraps, I would spend more time on them. A stone like a Petoskey stone becomes beautiful when you polish it. A thunder egg needs to be busted open to be beautiful.

I find I have a lot of opinions like that these days. I can pretend well that it doesn’t disturb me, but in a generalized way it does. My perceptions used to be mostly shades of gray, I find more black and white at the edges now. If I were instructing a novice who’d never written a flash before I wouldn’t even mention time or Petoskey’s or thunder eggs. I wouldn’t mention structure with the exception of a passing nod at word limits, that which makes a flash a flash. I would concentrate on how wide open the field is; how broad and how narrow your focus can be. I would suggest that they write some before reading any. I would ask them to go get a blood test and when I saw cotton taped to the inside of their elbow I’d put a hand to my lips and say “Oh Em Gee, I was just kidding.”

It was hard not to think of julienormal who along with her paramour works in a game and music store. I imagine it’s a counterclockwise drain version of GameCrazy or whatever the equivalent is in your town. Julienormal is one of the more exotic examples of why I’ve held on to OD for so long. I don’t normally get to share opinions and notes with young kiwis in my day to day. But it doesn’t have to be that exotic, even those of you as close as San Francisco are folks I wouldn’t have access to if not for OD.

Most of the adventures in my life have had at least in some small part a sort of social star trek theme; to explore new cultures and boldly go. OD is my static version of that; no standing on cold highways or busting down crack house doors, just some genteel typing or less than genteel typing.

When Circum Cision was closing down its stores they wound up having this sort of die-hard crew that had become experts at closing down stores. Yesterday I met someone who was part of Blockbusters pall bearer crew. She was awfully butch in a sort of feminine way, visible tattoos, and bug lady glasses. We talked about Detroit starting off nice enough, I was buying their closeout zebra drizzled popcorn and she said she had the best popcorn in the Detroit airport, then I turned things dark with the fall of Detroit, a post-apocalyptic city, a cautionary tale for the nuclear generation. Yep I spread joy and glee everywhere I go.

The dogs slept through the night, or at least allowed me too. My fat little special guy had some kind of ants in his pants this morning, wanting outside seconds after I stirred. He ran out furiously sniffing things, charging at shadows, peeing, attacking a leaf then running back in, doing his little dance on the mat in front of the porch door and diving back under the covers to power nap. Otis twitched an ear. I don’t know how Levi learned the power dance or why Otis will walk around a bit after coming indoors with muddy feet but before getting into the bed, but I like it. When it’s really pouring now they’ve taken to standing in front of the bathroom door. Otis just stands, Levi starts whining his fat little bitch ass whine. It took me a little while to be trained. It means they want to be toweled off. I was originally trained by Herschel who hated towels and liked muddy dog prints on white comforters or duvet covers. Except for the rare bath I don’t recall Levi even seeing many towels and even some of his rare baths have been at the dog wash where the dryer is a sort of industrial blow dryer. I guess so you can layer your dog’s hair if you need to, make him look like Bobby Sherman (and old heart throb for those of you under a hundred).

Spazzmo, the cat, used to have a special dance for going outside, though it was more like the dancing you do while driving the car, all forepaw and neck. He’d roll his neck at you, looking upside down at you at random intervals, pawing the air and occasionally punctuating it all with a garbled half meow like he was in too much of a hurry for a full meow, like a kitty abbreviation or meowing acronym. I think taking a towel to spazzmo would have got you a face full of claws unless you snuck up on him and got his paws wrapped first. Even so you’d have a towel with five pounds of raging furry fury in it.

Ok, let’s see; Flash, flash tutelage, Julienormal, business closure, whiney bitch ass, towels. That pretty much covers it. And I’m spent.