Saturday, July 30, 2011

First 100 Words


I like Saturday mornings. Wish every morning was Saturday morning. Unlike those other used-up mornings, Saturday morning is all potential. All is possible. Anything might happen. The first one hundred words, perhaps.

For me, most Saturday morns begin with groceries shopping, the urban human's nod to the ancient need to hunt down dinner. Only I am pushing a shopping cart. And the ground beef is easier prey. Have an inexplicable hankering now to fingerpaint the apartment walls like Lascaux: the hunt for the great ground beef, its one-pound pieces across the freezer case, and my hand print.

Heh, Yes, Saturday morning groceries-gettin'. I've become fond of going the couple of miles east to the Superstore. There's the hunt, already mentioned. Just as useful, because on occasion I write, is the Saturday morning opportunity for people-watching. Useful, for the research. People-watching also is non-fattening, free entertainment.

Saw the expected this morning. People ignoring the mostly vacant parking lot away from the store: the resultant gridlock of too many cars and not enough parking at the store front. And folks chattering away on cell phones as they shopped.

And some really quite personal chatter, y'know. Hey, I don't consider it eavesdropping when someone decides to chatter private matters, in a public place, and loudly enough this weekend writer hungry for research can hear them from the next aisle over. They're lucky I'm discreet.

Did spot one scene. It happened before me like a scene. Like something that might work in sci-fi. The bluetooth flashing ear-bug directing a fit-looking fellow in unnecessarily bright beach shorts and t-shirt along the pasta aisle.

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It is a nice sunny Saturday out, too. I'd like the beach...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

i just had a completely absurd thought: "they have pasta in space?" of course they have pasta in space. there's pasta everywhere, even if the Italians aren't.

Burndtree said...

Not absurd at all, Jack. Pasta’s everywhere. The universal food. So, there’ll be pasta in space...out there...in the Big U.

Oh there already was. Something clicked, days ago. Now I realize what that click was.

John Hurt, and spaghetti. In Alien. His curiosity had gotten the better of him, the silly man. He seemed to have gotten lucky, tho, eh? He and crew are munching through dinner before sleep. John, really enjoying his spaghetti, begins to choke. Something stuck in his throat, clearly. Crew staring at him: Yaphet Kotto probably thinking “What’s eating him?”