Spilling the Seed V4.0

Straight From the Rejection Desk of Mc'Sweeneys, In Sunny California.

It started innocent enough.

There I was, sitting at my desk, staring at some story I was working on. I was stuck, for the life of me I couldn’t think of what to write next, so I went looking around on the Internet. I started with the usual, the Myspace’s and IGoogle’s, looking at the funny news and pretty formatting, watching miniaturized Youtube videos. I visited the sites of all my favorite writers and pundits, read their daily messages, went back and read the quotes of the day, plugged random words into search engines, and filing through the result pages something started to grow, a word, an idea, an insurmountable new reality in the URL’s…

Blog.

It was everywhere, everyone, it was everything, it was new consciousness, it was everything we stood for in the fucking sixties man!

So I started small.

I pulled the paper out of the gray Swintec 8011, and turning my back to the antiquated master that I had been shackled to for so many long fruitless years, the belly of the keyed beast which I rubbed and whose mouth regurgitated my brilliant but completely unappreciated series of noir-ish sci-fi detective novellas. I left it to rest for the uterine glow of the monitor screen, dappled with the marks of the words of others, and I took in their words and spat out mine. My responses were pearls, a beautiful mahogany baseboard tapering a marvelously finished wall of words.

Finally, It was my turn.

I was connected. I was alive. I had a forum. It didn’t matter anymore if no one read about Don Heddersdown, the dashing hero of my creation, the lady-killer with the wit and breathtaking genius to foil the invasion plans of the most advanced alien minds. I had friends now, and I was helping to save my local library, selflessly I might add, as they had most ruthlessly refused to put my books into circulation. Though now those realities were of little consequence, my past failures matter for naught now. My unregulated thoughts funneled into the glow, every line equal to it’s predecessor, ancestor, progeny, descendant, all the same!

I was a star.

Thousands came now, and I knew them all. We were connected, all interlaced, intertwined like limbs, tender, rough, sexual to each other with our comments, our free flowing exchange of unabashed humanity. I took all the material ties to my old life to destruction, all the rejection letters from Random House and all the other square corporate zombies, all my unfinished works. I smoked a twenty year old joint from a yellowed cellophane package in my sock drawer, laughing and coughing as I tossed the crumpled papers one by one into living room fireplace.

I was released from my earthly shackles.

Now I reveled in abandon, in my part of the revolution. We were just like all those writers people use to talk about when I was college, the ones who didn’t use punctuation or form, who wrote the books I never could understand, never had time to read while scraping by for my BSA. Just like that summer before State College, I stopped bathing, shaving, following current acceptable fashion standards; I bought a really expensive chair with some space age fabric you could sort of see through. Thousands read me, and I read thousands, I am joined in their causes, it’s not just the library anymore, it’s cities and their grand plans of reconstruction, alternative political movements and their plans of revolution, some strange woman in Denver who is trying to save a tree. Every one of my thoughts was shared, but I was starting to have trouble recognizing where thought ended and life began.

I was lost.

One day when I was in the midst of writing my third mid-day blog, regarding in subject the nature of my third toe on my left foot being slightly thicker than its counterpart on my right foot, the cyclical parasitic life glow of the monitor abruptly extinguished itself, the natural electric hum of my domicile plunked off. The cessation of my umbilical feed caused a sharp pain in my gut and made my blood run ice through my veins as the fluid in my spine boiled up and down. I looked away from my desk but my field of vision was obscured, there was a square shape, a ghost of the monitor represented by yellow and black spots. After twenty minutes or so I managed to get up and try the light switch, It was easy to tell the power was out as I kept all my blinds closed so that I could see the monitor better. Scanning the room properly for the first time in months, I looked over the scattered waste littering the floor, culminating into a small mountain like shape at the foot of my chair. It was while considering whether or not to make the subject of my first early evening blog the terrestrial shapes that garbage can resemble that I noticed an odd gray corner protruding from a large pile of semi-fossilized desk trash. On top of the pile with the gray corner was a large stack of envelopes, I remembered putting them there because they had been part of a larger accumulation of post that was outside, but the mailman had knocked on the window one day until I came and took some inside, interrupting a very good blog in which I was addressing how much I like fish, but am nervous about actually investing in buying one because of their extremely high mortality rate.

Things were coming to an end.

Exploration by match light of the items in question revealed several disturbing truths. It turns out that I hadn’t paid my utility bills in three months, and my bank account was overdrawn. I tore through the stack of envelopes, every one dragging me back from the world of free ideas; there was a letter from a publishing house. I didn’t recognize the name on the letterhead, the motto underneath suggested that the company specialized in books for young adults, I hadn’t the faintest idea what they would want with a former author of serious crime stories like myself. I was about ready to toss the letter in the fireplace without reading it, but I was amused enough by the young adult slant to keep reading. It was an offer, with a promised advance to follow, if I sent in a sample chapter for a new story. Glory! I have tons of unpublished stories, hordes of sample chapters… Or, to say, I used to have all those things. After I had read the letter thirty four and one half times, I spent a good hour with my hands in the ashes of the fireplace. They were going to come shut off the water and the heat soon, and I had as much thrown money into a fire as anything else, I had no material left and I had to start over.

Reality is most cruel to those who forget it is there.

I was sitting in front of my typewriter, in my home office corner, now clear of trash and stale Cheetos, the computer dark and pushed back to the rear of the desk surface. I was clean-shaven and wearing appropriate clothes, it looked like a Yeti had attacked my bathroom, little squares of toilet paper with red dots in their centers adorned my face. The sun was going down and my hands were still resting idle on the keys. I wished Detective Heddersdown would come and save the Earth with his trademark trench coat swagger, use his unparalleled skills of deductive reason stop a race of mind controlling aliens from stealing all of Venezuela’s’ first born children; I wished that Detective Don would save me. That’s what I wished, anyway, but I was out of words, no matter how long I sat there in front of the typewriter I couldn’t even begin a story. All I could think about was the lack of grammar in the names of machines, or the useful nature of dry erase boards. I had typed away my seed into the mindless electronic void, and in return, God had struck me blind, dumb and poor.