Scratchpad Blues

You always have to be careful around writers, my friend laughs during a presentation of his latest novel. They steal everything you say, especially from other writers. The moment you start telling a story – “Oh man, guys, you’ll never believe what happened to me the other day-“ they turn to you with this little gleam in their eye, l’occhio del ladro, the eyes of a thief. “Oh?” they say. “And just what did happen to you the other day?” “Uh – nothing, I swear!” Bad writers borrow, great writers steal. I’m pretty sure I’ve both appropriated and misquoted that line from Stravinsky. Who took it from T.S. Eliot, who I would call the original source if he hadn’t probably lifted it from someone else anyway. I’m not a writer, but I want to be one someday. This blog is my gym and sandbox: the current objective is simply to get ideas on the page and hit “publish”, exposure therapy for the terminally self-critical. I deliberately make my terrible first drafts see the light of day be

Everyone says that once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. This happens to be a lie. The second-to-last last time I rode a bicycle I was eight years old. It was about 7:30 on a nice spring evening. My parents were out at a show, and my babysitter and I were racing our bikes around the loop. I grew up on a street that formed a closed loop, far from the rest of the suburbs of our tiny town. The parents loved it for its isolated security, and the kids loved the fact that it was a literal racetrack. Any time I went out of the house on wheels, be they bicycle or rollerblade, my mother insisted on strapping me into a full suit of armor. Hard plastic knee pads, elbow shields, cast-like wrist braces, a helmet recalling a cosmonaut’s. I looked like a robot, was teased mercilessly by the other kids on the street and was terrified to go too fast because obviously I was in mortal danger. Gradually the fear dissipated and I was able to display a level of confidence and ski