PRETENTIOUS WRITING BY CRAZE

This stuff doesn't have names. I just write it for class as twenty-minute quickwrites. I'm an elementary education major concentrating in Language Arts; I really should be a secondary ed major but apparently I'm an idiot. Some of it is too pretentious for its own good. There might be some minor grammar issues since this is more like sketching than real work, but I figure it'll interest somebody.

I'm not going to post everything I write because a lot of it is even worse than the paddymelon story.


I drove to Waterville today, looking for books. This is after having driven to Skowhegan to try to find The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I went to a used bookstore and a children's bookstore in Waterville before going to Mr. Paperback, where I discovered that it was on the New York Times' bestseller list for children's literature. I also discovered something else: that even the most populated areas in Maine are depressing, like an icy and poorly-plowed Hell.

Having no idea where I was going, I just parked my car near a gas station. I saw a worker there give me the stink-eye; I feared that I was going to be towed, but the city is such a maze of impossible one-way streets that I didn't want to find somewhere else. I have never and will never use that gas station, and I will likely never meet that attendant. Such is life, and due to my disassociation I felt both alone and empowered. His feelings wouldn't be hurt; I wasn't an ex-boyfriend taking out personal vengeance on the tarmac, nor was I trying to waste the station's resources. I was disconnected, but I couldn't care less â€" only about my car.

The ice on the sidewalk was uneven. The ice was hills and valleys. It was treacherous. I found myself walking more on the road than the sidewalk, for it was more like a sideworld given how random and natural it was. The only manufactured part of the unwelcoming terrain was the two-foot-high walls on either end of a strip; people had just shoved the snow from their driveways onto the sidewalk. People, I tell you: they are lazy shits. They couldn't care less about me, unlike the station attendant. The association was reversed, as now I was upset at them instead of they at me. Apathy and concern were shifted and yet it never meant much of anything in the end.

It turned out that the various stores I tried first were several blocks away, but extremely close. I mean, they were right on top of each other. The lady at the children's bookstore told me to go downstairs to see the man in the used bookstore. Greeted by an unattractive young woman who smelled of greasy Town Name House of Pizza cuisine instead of the expected male (as in, she was not male, not that I was expecting her to smell like a man), I was pointed toward Native American studies and found nothing even vaguely like Absolutely True. I did, however, find a novel/sociological study on growing up in the Bronx. I opened it up, saw “motherfucker” three times on one page and knew that it was for me. I also bought a creepy-looking humor book from the late fifties. It is one of the most sexist and racist things I have ever browsed through, which made it intriguing and uncomfortable... kind of like Waterville's wild sidewalks.

When I went to Mr. Paperback, it was much larger than I had expected. It was clean, it was even; no hills to trudge up or valleys to slide down. I found my book after asking a pleasant associate and then went on my way. The Cadbury egg was delicious, even though Cadbury eggs aren't that important in the scheme of things. They just don't matter, you know? Books matter. Individual books might not matter, ratio of “motherfucker” to any other word aside, but books matter. Cadbury eggs are devoured and then excreted. Good books are devoured and shared with friends or people who are actually interested.

I would never share Absolutely True with that gas station attendant, and likely not with any of the lazy shits that I only called lazy due to not knowing them. Those people are nothing, the Cadbury egg was tasty, and I am alone.


This morning I was noisy as hell.

I really, really tried to be quiet, but that only makes it worse. Every piece of paper scrapes on at least three different surfaces, every drawer creaks no matter how slowly you open it. My shoes are very loud, so stepping was a new percussion instrument adding to the cacophony. Even the whiteboard fell off of the damn door with a bang! Attempt to remain silent sends a message to all surrounding inanimate objects: “please echo as loud as possible.”

Poor Brody, trying to sleep after his post-Superbowl/Glee homework binge. He didn't have class until ten o'clock, and yet there I was at seven-forty, sounding like drunk French revolutionists with bashes and clangs instead of heroic song and prose. At least I didn't have a gun; it probably would have gone off (better that Eponine dies than my roommate in this rebellion).

Someday I will learn how to be a ninja. Until then, I must live with being unfortunately loud. It's not really on my list of “things to ask a genie if I had X wishes,” however. Well, maybe at #16 or somewhere like that. I could see it being useful.


Few know about the war that's been raging in Australia for decades. It's not quite a civil war, and it's not quite bloody â€" at least, it wasn't until the recent murder of Dr. Howard IV.

Dr. Howard was a zoologist who specialized in marsupials â€" making Australia the ideal place to be born and raised. And while kangaroos might be the poster boy for marsupials, he had a large passion for a smaller creature: the pademelon. Pademelons are small wallabies with thin tails that populate the rainforests of Australia. Dr. Howard's great-grandfather, Dr. Howard, named the pademelons. Thus, his death at the hand of Mr. Jacobson III, the grandson of Dr. Jacobson, was no great surprise.

Studying to be a biologist at the university the eldest Dr. Howard taught at, pre-doctorate Dr. Jacobson was the secret lover of Dr. Howard. Their tryst soon ended when Dr. Jacobson graduated and published an extensive report on the common Austalian weed he officially dubbed “paddy melon.” Ever since, the descendants of these men have been fighting a blood feud.

That's not to say that this is a contained battle, however. Zoologists and botanists duke it out in underground fighting rings, with scientists from around the world betting on which side of biology will eventually earn a completely unique title for their curious species.

Dr. Howard IV will be mourned by many, especially the barely legal botanist Dr. Jacobson IV, who subtly came out in last month's Aussie Biology Monitor with the line “I can attest that Dr. Howard IV's research samples of paddy melon gourds are quite {content removed}.”


It was a normal night at the laundromat before they heard the scream. Elle and Ludmilla, teenage daughters of an up-and-coming Ukranian businessman, were doing their whites and playing cards. Several seconds passed before Ludmilla realized that the scream came from her. She had been moderately concerned about her family's undergarments and blouses being pink; she had been horrifically shocked by the dead man underneath her favorite pair of panties.

Elle called out for 911, then realized that would be fruitless in the vacant building. She pulled out her cellphone and dialed while Ludmilla stood still, hand over her mouth. A slight bit of drool started to dribble out of her underbite. When a cold breeze blew in through the propped-open door and chilled the wet spot, Ludmilla finally wiped it away. As if the drool sobered her she staggered backward, hand moving from her mouth to out in front of her. She fell onto a bench. Her mouth seemed liked it had a stick in it, keeping it as agape as the door.

The police asked Elle, the elder sister, if she had seen anybody else come in or out of the laundromat. She said no, but that they went down the block at one point. They forgot to bring fabric softener, which their mother required them to use. The whites were left in the washing machine during their trip.

Suspicious, the more inquisitive of the two cops present pressed Elle for more information about this and that. The other pulled out the body with an EMS worker's help. It was a young middle-eastern man, only five foot six on a good day. Today was not a good day for him. Meanwhile, Ludmilla came back to her senses. She looked around and found a hat behind her, a fedora slightly darker than army khakis. It had a frayed auburn band around it. Ludmilla picked it up idly, turning it in her hands while her eyes darted from the corpse to her sister, her sister to the corpse. Images of Elle's corpse came to mind, but she tried her best to ignore them.

Ludmilla accidentally dropped the fedora. As she bent over to pick it up, she noticed a bump in the band. Upon further investigation, she found a small black card that said nothing but “Violet 2Nite” in, oddly enough, bold pink lettering. The back was simply black with a thin green line.