Back when I was a poor college student, I couldn't afford a computer, and I hated writing my papers in the computer lab. So, I scraped together what money I could and bought a Brother word processor. It was on this clunky machine that I wrote all of my college papers, as well as my own recreational crap, and even some of the first articles published in newspapers after college.

I still have the machine as well as a stack of floppy disks full of stuff I wrote back then. I pulled the whole works out today and did some reading. Wow. I don't remember writing any of this stuff.

I used to do this thing where I would just sit down and start writing, with very little as far as a plan. There was no point to this, it was sort of a brainstorming exercise to see what weird BS I could come up with if I let my mind run free. Check this out:

Father Knows Best

I always wanted a father like the fathers on TV: Ward Cleaver, Mike Brady. I wanted a father who wore a tie and carried a briefcase and went to the office. I wanted a father who called "family meetings" and talked to me "man-to-man."

But my old man was different. He came home at five fifteen with sawdust in his hair. By five twenty-five he was asleep. At five forty-five I'd wake him. He'd take off his coveralls and we'd eat.

His hands were greasy and tipped with thick yellow nails. They looked like a mass of molten black iron and glass: something found in the ruins of a burnt house.

In spite of all this, I tried to act like a TV kid. "Did you bring me anything?" I'd ask. He looked at me as if I were naked.

It occurred to me one day, "Charles Ingalls works with his hands. Maybe he can be like Charles Ingalls."

"That jackass," my old man said.

I stopped my dreaming one Sunday when my old man called from the basement. "Hey junior," he said. "Come down here and help me with this."

He had built this weird looking thing out of a lantern battery, a black metal cylinder, and a mass of copper wire. The whole thing was mounted on a sheet of plywood. "Here, hold this wire," he told me. I did. What did I know? I was ten.

He picked up another wire and grabbed my free hand. The shock hit me like a medicine ball.

Before the electricity left my body, I started to imagine the potential this new toy held. Almost immediately, I was calling for my brother, my mom, the cat.

I wanted to shock the world. Put the fear of Frankenstein into every man and beast. Most of all, I wanted to jold Ward Cleaver, Mike Brady, Charles Ingalls.

"That jackass," my old man said.

I think I will post some more of these in the coming days. I do remember this one, since it is a true story, but there are so many that are completely new to me, as if they were written by someone else.

This is fun.

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