Aug 26 2008
Add a Sentence
It’s that time of year again, everybody. It’s time for us to put aside our differences and write a story together. Instead of writing 5 words each like we did last time, everyone gets to add a full sentence. There are no restrictions to the length of the sentence. Do whatever works. Just keep it clean and friendly. The story begins like this:
The house was built on a cracked foundation. A young man named Peter Wilson lived in the basement with that cracked foundation. Any kind of precipitation, hail, rain or snow, required he lift his shoes and books off the floor where they would otherwise get wet overnight. The water seeping through the foundation at times became audible, the sound of a trickling brook. Inevitably Peter would make several trips to the bathroom. A rug by the side of his bed had to be rolled up and stuffed onto a shelf in his closet. He would have damp feet all night.
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Peter lay in bed, tossing and turning because the pervasive dampness made it hard to get warm enough to fall asleep.
He imagined the water rising, floating him and his bed out the door as he slept, down the street to the harbour.
The harbour, once a place of personal enchantment, joy and laughter, now haunted his dreams.
And these slushy, muddy, never-dry dreams, in turn, haunted his waking days, days that he (and his dog Muckmuck) would have rather spent working on his thesis with the ponderous but undoubtedly accurate and important working title, “The Adult-Tiger Relationship in Calvin and Hobbes: A Jungian Archetype or an Adlerian Neurosis?”
One morning, while standing in Home Depot reading the labels of sealers and epoxies, he realized that the long drying times needed for epoxy would enable him to work on the thesis and stop the seepage at the same time, thus breaking the strangle-hold of lethargy and lighting his creative and restorative juices simultaneously.
Thus a new sense of optimism prevailed and Peter with renewed vigor (and dry feet) felt it was time for the fieldwork on his thesis to commence — bring on the tiger!
“On second thought,” he thought, “what the hell am I doing working on a some silly thesis no one will ever read or care about?”
He crumbled the three completed pages into a ball, tossed them somewhere near the overflowing trash can, and turned on the TV.
Several months passed sitting in front of the television in that watery basement and then one day the damp and wet creeped into the heart of the TV and, in a display of sparks more interesting than anything broadcast for hours, shorted it out.
Peter sat, stunned and silent in the dripping dark, the nascent flash of the dying TV slowly fading from his retinal memory, and as the image faded he started to embrace the quiet and wonder what he was doing there.
In the darkness, the thesis, it had become the rotting carcass of the albatross wrapped around his life, but perhaps not all was despair.
Before he could lose his nerve, he grabbed his cell phone and called Emily.
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