I don’t exactly remember how this started, but all the sudden I found myself wanting to write a short story. Maybe I had been reading some David Sedaris, or maybe it was “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole that got me started. Looking at what I have down now, close to 2,000 words, I can see the heavy influence from “A Confederacy of Dunces” . My main character is similar to Ignatius J. Reilly, in the sense that he lives with his mother and feels like he is surrounded by fools.  As per the advice of Stephen King, I won’t go into the details of the story before it is finished, but I’ll post a small excerpt here. My goal is for a story around 10 pages, or something like 7,000 words. Don’t know if it will be any good, or whether I will meet this commitment, but I like pounding on the keyboard. Makes nice sounds. 

         Chester Leone’s six  hours of peace came to an end when the clock struck five a.m., and the raucous sound of the city’s trash collection trucks awoke him. He was dressed in his blue pin striped PJ’s, fuzzy gray slippers, and a night cap that had the words “St. Abundius Preparatory School” embroidered onto its front. For five minutes, he just sat up in his bed mentally preparing himself for another hellish day in academia. Outside the window of his apartment were the usual sights; the weird old cat lady buttering her toast, the rotten kids waiting for the bus, and of course the African-American couple arguing publicly in the street over something or the other. It was a very strange assortment of things to wake up to, but it was, to say the least, very unique. Chester often thought that he was in some vast, expansive mental hospital with all of these precocious characters in his small neighborhood. As if some P.H.D type had set up a massive experiment that put all of these crazies into one area, contained and isolated from the rest of the world. But somehow Chester got put in this cage on accident. It was a sort of “Truman Show” element that seemed to be the only logical answer; Chester supposed this element governed his life and accounted for all of his failure.  Nonetheless, it was the life he chose to lead.

            At 5:10, Chester walked over to the cramped kitchen area of his apartment. His slippers stuck as he walked across the cheap linoleum floor.  The countertop was furnished with the usual appliances; a microwave oven, an old-style pop-up chrome toaster, and a percolator coffee pot. He first greeted the coffee pot by replacing its soggy filter with a new one, and soon shoveled some Choc full o’Nuts coffee grinds into it. The potent aroma of cheap coffee provided the perfect environment for Chester to start thinking about what to eat. His white-washed cabinets were filled with all sorts of popular “5 minute” breakfast solutions he had seen on TV so many times in the morning.  There was the granola bar type products, the oatmeal, the cereal, and the stupid pop-tart. He cared very little for all of these and always felt like a complete fool after having been convinced into buying them in the first place. That was life though, he thought, just one giant, phony commercial.

A small excerpt of the short story I’m working on. Don’t hurt yourself, I don’t know if it is any good. Consult your doctor. 

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