Drunken Rambling

So I heard about this place, where people go to read their short stories to one another, and where a couple of published authors are on hand to give feedback. You read your four minute story, and then they either say luke-warm polite things if they hate it, or ridiculously over-encouraging things if they think it's okay.

I'm pretty shy at the best of times when it comes to letting people see my writing, so I struggle to imagine myself ever going along to read my work aloud in the near future. But as I sat bored on the train home from the pub last night, I began to write as though I had just that half-hour journey to prepare for it.

I didn't quite finish, it starts slowly, and there's no clear link between the start and the end; but in a desperate effort to keep churning out "content" for this place, I spent a little time this evening interpretting my scarcely legible scrawl. This blog has always had a fairly liberal attitude to quality control, so I couldn't see a good reason not to post it:

A similar notebook to the one I carry, but with better, smaller handwriting

It seems I have less than four minutes to do this. Between here and where I finish, everything must be resolved, my audience must have sat captivated from beginning, middle, to end, and the success of everything depends on the strength of their applause.

I should probably tell a story. I kinda feel that's what's expected of me. But have you ever tried to tell a story in what's now scarcely over three minutes? It's really hard. Even more so when you have these successful, qualified people sitting on the sidelines waiting to point out where you've gone wrong.

So they're probably not going to be impressed with this long-winded, roundabout start to the story. “Where's the fiction?” they might well ask themselves. And they'd be right. This is a cheap, contrived way to set up this little tale, that's eating into the precious little time available to me to tell you about my character Joe, that this story is all about.

Joe, like me, would agonise and procrastinate before getting on with what everyone expected him to do. He, like me, led a life that followed the path of least resistance, and which allowed social mores to tell him where to go and who to be. And to all extents and purposes, he seemed happy. Some of his friends had even gone as far as to call him, “happy-go-lucky”.

But Joe wasn't happy. He could smile and say the right things at the right time, but as far as he was concerned life was hollow and empty. He'd never made a decision for himself for as long as he'd been alive, and lived by the principle that he should always do what would annoy the smallest number of people.

Now don't worry. I can see from some of your concerned faces that after my convoluted introduction you're a little concerned that maybe there's not so much difference between our friend Joe and your narrator here. But I promise, I'm nothing like him. For starters, I'd never systematically murder every single pet cat living within a one mile radius of my house.

Y'see, Joe had been conditioned well enough. He knew better than to break the law, and wouldn't dream of overtly offending our moral guardians. But by catching cats (often quite a challenge in itself), and butchering them (quite humanely) he felt he could do something extraordinary with his life. By hanging them from lamp posts on his local High Street, he could gain the kind of notoriety sadly lacking in his day-to-day life. And he, like anyone able to sufficiently distance themself from the reality of the situation, was able to appreciate a headline in his local newspaper that read, “SICK CAT THROTTLER STRIKES AGAIN”

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