Years back I had an idea for a story. A novel about a boy, his dog, the end of the world. I did some relatively quick story breaking and wrote about 60 pages of poorly structured, self-seriousness that I knew was going nowhere. So I quit. Writing. I quit writing. Anything. About 9 years later I picked up the idea again. I did a couple more months of story breaking. Again, too hard I quit. Which became my power-mantra for the new phase of life I had unfortunately found myself in. But, I suppose quitting was even too hard, so I quit that too and picked up the idea again. Not to be outdone by that idiot Previous Me, I decided that the story deserved not just one book but a multiple book series. This prompted me to ruminate about my earlier attempts spanning nearly two decades. "I'm dying," I thought. (mandatory quitting) I did a little story breaking and decided that if I died, I should have at least one page that I thought was true to me and going in the right direction. I'm now about 5 months into breaking the story. (Is that normal?) It's going pretty well. (Is that normal?) But just in case my body quits before I do, here is the presumptive first bit:
"The situation reminded him of the puppet show in seventh grade and the unfortunate lies surrounding it. True, the production wasn’t officially sanctioned by the seventh grade. Also true was that the corpses of the frogs and the robotics equipment were sole property of the Gardenia Academy For Boys And Girls. But it was conveniently overlooked that he had been enrolled in Introduction to Physiology and, however “disgraced,” a formerly registered member of the Gardenia Academy Robotics Club. As such he had an inalienable right to those resources. Technicalities aside, Cope still reeled at the willful self-deceit that, according to Mr. Black, the principal of the G.A., the incident wasn’t a puppet show at all but a, “phantasmagoric affront to innocence and God himself.”
Cope wasn’t going to kid himself. The show did end poorly. There’s really no arguing with the hysterical tears of kindergärtners, however self-important.
Currently, Cope sat in the empty quiet of the Tuesdale High Remedial Studies out-building. Despite his new school, the horrific screams of the children, now two years older, echoed through the halls of Cope’s mind. His brow furrowed. He shook his head and pulled a tiny notebook and pencil from his pocket. Tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, Cope scribbled, “Know your audience.”
Cope visually inspected his surroundings. The Remedial Studies out-building was only a building in the way tomato sauce on an English muffin was a pizza. It was a mobile room at the edge of the school grounds. Despite its windowless, tinny, easily-disassembled modular construction and susceptibility to derechos, the faded synthetic wall paneling and the weeds growing around its base told a more permanent story. Cope needed an out. He needed to “flip the script” as his father used to say.
Cope’s stomach hung heavy. His eyes continued to wander about searching for the mental thread he had previously let go of. Opportunitas. Yes. Veritas. Yes, yes! What was the takeaway? Lessons learned? Action items? Next steps? The melted wings of Icarus as he plummeted towards Earth? Man’s hubris? The jealous cruelty of the gods? Cope poked at his notebook again. “Always,” he wrote then scratched it out. He recalculated. “Never,” he wrote then scratched that out too before settling for some meditative contemplation.
The failure was surely not a conceptual one despite Ms. Armstrong’s smug observation that robotically reanimated frogs performing the hit Broadway musical Cats was an absurdity. “Yet no one said peep when adult humans dressed up as cats seven times a week for eighteen years straight,” Cope silently rejoinded. He then mumbled something to himself that sounded like, “Seven Tony Awards.”
The failure, obviously, was purely technical and hardly “catastrophic.” Then as if once again a seventh-grader in Mr. Black’s office, Cope said, “Yeah, there was some recoil but it was recess. Kids are barely even housebroken at that age.”
After his rejoinder Cope reset himself yet again to see if he could glean any lessons from the past. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and remembered.
Technically, it was still summer. Kids continued to ride the faint electric current that came with the beginning of every school year. The reality of a nine month academic grind hadn’t hit yet. The time to execute his venture was at hand. In another week or two the optimistic bones of “K” through eighth-graders would have been ground into flower by the fear of the first quarter’s report cards. “Mr. Black needs his bread too,” Cope thought.
Additionally, the Robotics Club was sure to have discovered the missing equipment. Cope had been certain that there wasn’t any conclusive evidence linking him to his alternative-methods of procurement but the hard feelings following his unceremonious expulsion from the club didn’t bode well for him. At least “hard feelings” was how Cope had interpreted the president’s need to shriek something so factually apparent as, “We’re just men!”
Besides, private school didn’t require hard evidence to punish a student. As Cope had surmised when he was admitted into the G.A. two years earlier mid-semester, private schools are not institutions founded on the rule of law. Grave matters are weighed and punishments dispensed by a select few power-drunk yet certainly well-meaning maniacs who are confident that their ultimate judge would be as fair and wise as they were.
Kindergärtners had seemed like a good test bed for Cope’s venture. They were curious, easily amused, impressionable and, if push came to shove, smaller than Cope. Fortune had it that all of his assumptions were more or less correct. The pre-show take was fifty eight cents, twelve puffy stickers, two fruit rollups, and a high-end Japanese cat eraser, all of which he had figured he could parlay into a new phone by the time the production had reached the eighth grade.
The things he didn’t particularly count on were two fold. First, was the poor tensile strength of necrotic frog flesh in the face of cheap Chinese-made servos performing an indulgently up-tempo rendition of Jellicle Cats. Second, was the volume of kindergärtners’ collective shrieks proportional to the physical volume of their lungs. If there was a supreme maker, a four-year-old’s ability to “squall,” as Mr. Black put it, was surely to make up for their diminutive statures and various physical and mental incapacities. Point, Intelligent Design.
Cope began to relive the actual performance in his mind’s eye but quickly looked away concluding that there were no greater lessons to be learned from it and jumped straight to the fallout."