Spitball Army

Today I was sidelined with the incapcitating numbies, which is what I am calling the non-specific dizzyness and lethargy that I am associating with a cold.  I also can’t sit still in one place today.  So I am taking the opportunity to spend the afternoon in my office, clearing out the crap.

I have a wooden built-in desk that stretches most of the length of the room, an attic of sorts above the garage.  Half of the area is for working and sitting.  My computer is at that end.  The other half is the perfect height for either standing at, or working at while seated on the wooden stool.  My time is pretty equally split between the two halves of the desk.  Things had obviously gotten to a sad state when I realized that there was no room left at either end where I could spread out my materials and work.  So, I started boxing up the detritus and then sorting through it.

Here are a few of the many interesting things that I found:

–  An index card with the same basic sentence written two ways:

“On cold dry nights, sound travels farthest”
and
“On a cold dry night, sound travels far.”

Beside each sentence was a score:  four marks for the first sentence, two for the second.  I think I was going to use this to begin a story that I never wrote.  I probably got hung up on which first sentence to use, then got distracted and moved on to some other frivolity.

–  Three price tags, stapled together.  They were previously attached to a rocking chair that sits in the corner of the office.  There are five different prices written on the tags, none of them crossed out.  I have no idea which one of them represents what I paid for the chair.  No matter, because I love that chair!

–  Another index card.  On this are written two names that I encountered during my adventures selling inventory on eBay.  I fancied them as particularly Dickensian, and thought that they may one day serve me well as character names, assuming that I ventured into fiction writing.  The names:  Merkilee Smeed and Zachary Schnock.  Don’t you dare use them!

–  A note from my mother, written on stationery designed by my nephew, Nicholas:

–  The second page of Walter Kirn’s New York Times Book Review essay on The March, a novel by E.L. Doctorow, which contains this vivid sentence:

Most of the action in “The March” takes place in this creature’s elongated gut as it traces its infamous historic course from Atlanta to Savannah and beyond, excreting smoke and rubble from its hindparts as well as thousands of indigestible skeletons.

–  A three-star review by Josh Wilson in The Birmingham News of the November 23, 2002 show by Hem at Workplay.  Oh, Josh.  This was probably the show with the screaming, drunken woman in the upper balcony.  Anybody else remember her (how the hell could you forget her!)?  I might have shaved a star off my review because of that, too.

–  Several set lists, none of them dated.  I can tell you what the shows were, though:  The Damnwells in-store at Laser’s Edge; Josh Ritter at Workplay (the Hello Starling tour); Hem’s in-store at Laser’s Edge, which was their first visit to Birmingham.  The Hem set list is as interesting for the songs that were crossed out as for what they played:

–  A hardbound copy of Will James’ Lone Cowboy.  This is the 1946 reprinting of the 1930 book, lavishly illustrated.  I thought I had mailed it to someone.  There is a really good story here, which I will eventually write as a post.  Maybe that will get me to mail the book to its intended recipient.