The Well Has Run Dry
I’ve hit a bit of a writer’s block here. I’ve got like eleventybillion (just an estimate) unfinished drafts that I can’t seem to complete. Usually when this happens I go to my fall back 642 things to write about series, but I can’t even get the ball rolling on one of those. My recent health issues have consumed a lot of my time and have also scrambled my brain somewhat. So I’ve decided to take the lazy way out. I’ve been toying around with the idea of posting the first real thing I ever wrote when I was a young adult. Don’t worry, it’s not a tale of sparkly vampires or teenagers forced to fight to the death. It’s actually based on my own, pretty short at that point, life.
I was 19 and had just finished Navy boot camp. I was assigned to a training command in Great Lakes, IL to learn the job I was going to be doing. In my off time I first began to hang out with a few friends from my company. Most of them were at least 21 or looked that old. I looked like I was still 16. See where I am going here? Yeah, they wanted to go hang out at bars and clubs. I wanted to do that too but got kicked out of every place we went. Soon, they realized I was just excess baggage and moved on. I pretty much ended up just riding the bus to the movies and hanging out at the mall by myself.
This type of leisure activity got lonely real quick and I got homesick remembering all the good times I had with my high school friends. Since I was going to be stationed at this command for the better part of a year, I had my parents ship me some of my personal belongings from home. One of those was my Commodore 64 computer. One night when I was feeling particularly homesick, I sat down in front of my computer and started writing about my high school days. Before I knew it, the words were coming fast and furiously. I spent the next several months of my off time sitting in my barracks room eating take out and writing.
What I ended up churning out was a tale of my sophomore year in high school in a new town where we had just moved. It’s pretty comical when I read it now. Laughing at some of the things I thought were a big deal (thinking Holiday Inn was a fancy hotel) and also amazed at my innocence back then (man I was such a rube). Except to convert it into a PDF, I haven’t changed anything. All the misspellings and grammatical errors remain. It’s 51 pages and I know that to read it would take a significant amount of time of your own busy lives. So if you chose to skip this one I won’t hold it against you. I know, you were worried I would right? But if you are interested in seeing my first venture into the written word and would like to get a chuckle out of it, the link is below.
6 thoughts on “The Well Has Run Dry”
Sometimes when it seems like the well has run dry it turns out what’s really happening is there’s a leak down in the bottom and you have to do is go down there and patch it up–metaphorically, of course, which seems to be what you’re doing here.
I read about three pages and will go back and peer down the well later but in the meantime wanted to throw in that I’ve been listening to parts of Michael Chabon’s “Moonglow”, which has reminded me that remembering is a creative act.
You’ve got an interesting story here, one I think a lot of people can relate to, and if you decide to revise it don’t be afraid to embellish a little, stretch both memory and imagination. Not changing it to suit yourself is a wise thing, but changing it to suit the story can be as well.
Christopher recently posted…In Memory.
I have been occasionally accused of living too much in the past. However, the way I see it, I can only do that, if in the future, I make a present that becomes the past. Hmmm, that was either profound or total gibberish. I’ll leave that up to future readers to decide.
Gibberish. 😀
emelle recently posted…I’ve been busy – how ’bout YOU?
Ha! I can always count on you to give it to me straight.
I’ve got it open in another tab (soooo many open tabs right now – what am I even DOING with my life?) to read AFTER I’ve caught up on blog reading, blogging, making adjustments to my personal/professional website, sent out the mass mailing I’m in the middle of compiling, eating, sleeping, working, healing my Achilles tendon, shitting, etc. Sorry your book isn’t higher on my list. But it IS on the list!
Catch you in… a bit. 🙂
No worries. It’s just a silly thing I wrote when I was young. I need to get caught back up on your blog. I swear I will soon.