Fiction is not often shared on blogs. The format does not always lend itself easily to extensive characterization, and many people look to blogs to answer their questions quickly, rather than to be presented with more.
What blogging does offer to the fiction writer is an opportunity to try out characters and plot lines on a willing audience. The people who read my fiction posts are not the largest section of my audience, but they are some of my most loyal supporters. I created the "fiction. sorta." category for those posts of mine that are purely fictional as well as ones that concern real people and real events, but have been changed in certain ways to allow for more freedom with the details of plot.
Some of my favorite posts from this category are listed below:
The full archives for "fiction. sorta." are listed below. Have fun looking around. And if anything bothers you, just remember--it's only fiction. Sorta.
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The uselessly criminal exploit was in your blood now, and there could be no better target than the Epsilon Chi house to hit, now that you had conquered TAE and Delta Kappa. Epsilon Chi was lower down on the fraternity totem pole than your first two targets, but unlike the others its members still put stock in the silly traditions and rituals of its traditional Southern fraternal order. The Epsilon Chis were the only fraternity on campus to do things like elect a fraternity sweetheart, and choose “little sisters” of the fraternity from each new Freshman class. As such, the EX house was awash in institutionally sanctioned fraternity trinkets: lacrosse sticks and crew oars emblazoned with the house’s letters, sweatshirts and trophies, beer steins with pledge names, and rows and rows of professionally designed composite pictures of the fraternity brothers.
These were the kinds of things that other fraternities on campus thought were stupid and tried to eliminate from their chapters. Whereas the Delta Kappas, for example, despised the “travelling tools,” as they referred to the national fraternity representatives who oversaw their goings on, the Epsilon Chis sought to please their national fraternity and uphold its standards as stringently as might a chapter in the middle of the Deep South. And though the secret traditions of nearly all fraternities are whispered about, if you had to pick a house most likely to actually have engaged in the kinds of homosocial? homosexual? sadomasochistic? rituals you heard mentioned, the EXs were certainly the most likely of this campus’ candidates to have participated.
Like all fraternities, there was an air of secrecy about that house, and a certain East Coast and/or Old Southern aristocratic air to the house that both fascinated and creeped you out. Once, you were at an EX party, talking to your friend Ty (who had been recruited by the EXs, as well as several other fraternities, during rush quarter of your Freshman year), when you were approached by Daniel Finch, a notorious Junior alcoholic and card-carrying member of EX. Daniel Finch had taken a liking to you early on in the year, and had asked you to several date parties which you attended not because you liked him, but rather because the fraternities held such a fascination for you, and you felt like you wanted to know more about them, and about the boys who joined them.
Daniel Finch, his obvious issues with alcohol aside, seemed like a relatively normal person beneath all of the greek bullshit. Yet that night, as he tried to rush Ty for EX, he explained that Ty would potentially play an important role in the fraternity. “See,” Daniel Finch had slurred, “We have one graduating this year.” It seemed like a strange conglomoration of words to you, but then you were a sheltered Anglo-Saxon from a fairly homogenous town in Southern California. Your experience with demarcations of difference was limited, and you were not yet suspicious of statements like these, made by drunken boys wearing Polo and too much Drakkar Noir.
When Daniel Finch left, Ty had said, “Did you hear that?” and chuckled. And you–dumb–said, “What was he talking about?” Ty explained, “They ‘need’ me because they have only one other Jew in the house, and he’s graduating this year.” And you knew he was right, and sure, Daniel Finch was a lush, but still, wasn’t it odd that he, in this day and age, would not only think of a Jewish person as a token, but also feel comfortable being open about it. Initially, you wondered where Daniel Finch would have picked up the idea that these were acceptable expressions, to blatantly treat humans as objects, and to advertise to those very humans the fact that you did so. It was strange, wasn’t it?
It was the same fateful quarter that would forever acquaint you with the standard procedures of incarceration for those individuals deemed a danger to themselves or to others, and you had a week to find an elective to cover the science area requirement for graduation. Admittedly, it had been stupid to put it off this long: you had covered the other annoyance, the math area requirement, by taking Stats 60 the first quarter you had been at school. That was back when you actually rode your bike to class, paid attention to things like office hours, and performed well in courses concerning topics outside of the comparatively narrow subject matter of the formal novel of the long British eighteenth century.
Compounding your stupidity that Fall was the fact that you decided to take an upper division course to cover the requirement, when you could easily have taken Rocks for Jocks or Oceans or some other lecture course teeming with athletes to bring down the curve. But Elaine, your “little sister,” had really wanted you to take the course with her, since it also counted for her major. The major that she had this week, that is. Plus, it was psychology, so how hard could it be?
Your times in class were not as productive as they could be. You tried, but there were so many joke openings, what with the constant reference to laboratory rats and their psychological tormentors. This was the class that spawned the entire comic book mythology of Brutal Researcher, a research psychologist of the Mengelean school, and his white whale-like sidekick, Happy Mouse, a lovable ball of fluff who seemed always to have a trick up his sleeve for evading the menace of Brutal Researcher’s gigantic hypodermic needle. Sure, when the Brain and Behavior lectures featured stories with titles like “the little boy who liked salt,” about a child born lacking some kind of brain connection having to do with salt, your ears perked up. But it was always disappointing, because at the end of the scientific study of a young child’s obsessive compulsion to eat salt, you hungered for an explanation–even if only a narrative one, for the introduction of salt to the story . . . why salt, and not vinegar? or sugar? or pepper, for that matter? What did the salt represent, you wondered?
But it was all for naught. The Brain and Behavior lectures were ripe for constructing stories with fully realized narratives of your own, but they rarely provided the kinds of neat explanations upon which you had come to depend. Perhaps it was your first brush with the mechanisms of creative non-fiction–the kind of stories that did not end, could not end, with anything other than death. Like the woman who–on a manic high–bought six pink Cadillacs and allowed research psychologists to videotape her exploits. She was not going to have her problems magically solved by the scientists who studied her: their goal was not to cure her illness, but to map it. And more importantly, they did not even seem to care about its solution or its trajectory. They did not seem to need more of an explanation for her circumstances beyond a chemical one. Ultimately, if she refused treatment, they were happy to just let her be. Let her be crazy.
You were still high from your recent criminal success and, having escaped without suspicion, you both hungered for another quest. Your next target, the TAE house, was also out for the summer, and located just next door to the Delta Kappas. Had you been real cat burglars, perhaps this would have deterred you, to hit two houses right next to each other in quick succession. But this was not Mayberry, it was still summer vacation, and the campus was still had a one-week turnover rate for conference-goers and corporate seminar attendees. The only other campus inhabitants were graduate students who, made easily identifiable by the ever-presence of their bicycle helmets, would rather die than be caught at the top of fraternity hill.
Besides, it would be vaguely poetic to hit the TAEs next, second-in-line as they were in the grand pecking order of mid-nineties Stanford fraternities. The Delta Kappa house might be the only place on campus you could catch a glimpse of the surfer dude/water-polo player straight out of Central Casting–that species of Southern Californian boy with whom you had grown up and for whom you had, in spite of yourself, developed an begrudgingly loyal affection. But for their own part, the TAEs attracted the New Englander version of him, a J. Crew-wearing, witty retort offering, summer home- and trust fund-boasting incarnation of the same snotty jerk, both familiar and strange wrapped into one. It was the house that would take Fred Savage, eventually, and though they were the same, though they were all the same, you were not yet acclimated to it. Your understanding of men in those days–nay, your understanding of people–and their relative value could be read with astounding accuracy from across a room, while intoxicated, at a crowded party. There, in the dark, you studied those differences with a highlighter and tape flags, tucking away your notes for later, never suspecting that the answer was to be discovered in the similarities . . . a milestone of another day.
It was fascinating, this brave new world with such people in it. You sometimes saw a magic to it, a hoodoo voodoo, and that night was no different, when you stumbled into the main room at TAE, after plenty of prepatory drinking precautions. There, you discovered what must have been a beacon divined just for the two of you, Tanya and Anna, and placed high above the dance floor that had been host to countless How Soon Is Now? moments in this and years past. Because there, framed by vaulted ceilings and in the middle large white wall, should have been the fraternity’s letters, TAE, in carved wood and spray-painted gold.
The UnMom: I have a kid around here somewhere. Just not on this blog.
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ONLINE DATING CHRONICLES
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LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles is where I was born and raised. I always thought I'd leave, but for some reason I never did. Sometimes, I like it here. Other times, I'm not so sure. But good or bad, it has made me who I am.
Sometimes I take the melodrama of my life and twist and turn it until it looks almost charming. I do this because I want you to like me:
Cigarettes & Green Felt: This is about the time I figured out that adults were mostly full of shit.
Assburger: It's not just a disorder on the autism spectrum: it's also one of your relatives!
On Truth: Sometimes somebody will say something and it hurts your feelings. And then you will write a story about it and your aunt will call it "phenomenal." Everyone else will try to pretend like it never happened.
The Sheer And Unmitigated Power of Bob Mould: Sometimes you spend your formative years obsessed by an unrequited teenage crush, and then one day you realize that person is now an orthopedic surgeon who lives in your neighborhood. It kinda sucks when that happens.
Ben From Madera: For one Halloween, Ben dressed up like a bee, like that kid in the Blind Melon video. That's how I will always remember him.
Mr. Right-Click
He is my best friend, even if he uses a PC. And the fact that sometimes he will pretend to be a "Pancake Pirate" is only part of the reason. Arrrr!
Mini
His cutie-pie percentile group is off the charts.
Spinning
If you think this is just about exercise, then you have underestimated how wildly inappropriate people can be when they undergo physical pain in a group setting.
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