I just recently had this idea of writing a novel based on all of these little short tidbits of stories I've been writing over the past month. It makes perfect sense for the short attention span theatre of today's society...write little snippets of stories like these ten minute vignettes I'm doing, and let people's imagination run away with them, instead of having me be their guide. That being said...here are three more blasts of fiction, written in ten minute blocks...see where it takes you.

She opened her eyes...
To the glaring blue sky framed by the tall branches of a coastal redwood. She could feel the breeze, smell the salt on the air and taste dried blood on the edges of her mouth. Blinking once, then again, she sank into the stillness that was now and without moving her head, cast her eyes about. Sound seemed to be long way away, as if she were underwater but with the crystal clarity of squeegeed glass. Her body was scratchy lying clothesless on the droppings of this forest and she wasn't sure how to achieve movement. From an unfathomable distance, strength came walking into her transfixed vision and offered a helping hand. With only her mind moving, she took the familiar crutch and in a snow-glass blur felt the whole world fall out from under her. The leaves gave way to space, the treetops receded into the blue heavens and darkness began to close the area around her vision. A "what was happening" fear quickly turned to careless relaxation as falling through time and space was effortless and peaceful.

The room was empty...
When they burst through the door of the second story apartment. Looking for the greasespots that ripped them off, Tony and Angie had followed the two hippies in the their caustic meanderings for the past two days. They had continually returned to this non-descript building on East 23rd to re-stock, re-fuel, have sex, and douse more patchouli on themselves two or three times a day. Hippies are a weird sot, and as Tony had found out, they are as opportunistic as hungry rats when it comes to dope. Not always the peace, love and "let's just get along' vibe that they make themselves out to be, but more along the lines of the 'let's get something for nothing, work the system and take advantage of every free lunch out there. It's one thing to be a drug user, quite another to be a drug thief. If you can't afford it, don't use it, a simple mantra to Tony and Angie and the principal reason they were dealers and not washed up into the corners of society like high tide detritus. They trusted their clients and their clients trusted them creating a rare network of circular good will when it came to drugs. But this was different as they surveyed the despair in the broken room of people living like animals in the third world. The only thing moving scurried from under the bed to behind the sink. A plate of filth sat on a littered table decorated by childish drawings of a junkie higher than a peach pie on Sunday.

Did you drop this?...
I found it walking down the street just north of the park I usually see you in. I happened to be out watching the trees slowly come out of their winter hibernation, seeing the new moms with their spring packages all tucked into warmth, and the dogs loping idiotically behind. It looked lonely and cold, not exactly dressed for the weather and seemingly out of place here in the city. You have one of those kind faces with smiling eyes that I think fondly of when I see something in my imagination that belongs to you. I wonder if you know it's missing, if you think you just misplaced it or you have a hole in your day because you know, just know deep down in your soul, that it up and walked out on you. In that case, should I try and return it, or tuck it in with me, feed it, love it, nurture it and watch it grow into a beauty only the stars can imagine?
What do you do with a found broken heart?

Eight Minutes
Afraid to see his face...
By the time they had left the smoky confines of that downtown bar she was no longer sure of her desires. They had been eating and drinking since the light of day, and now, pushing three in the morning, and staggering into the rain soaked street she had only heard the horn and screech of brakes. His head had turned into the oncoming light only to be whiplashed over the hood and into the windshield. A scream aimed at silence rose from her throat and bounced down the street like a golf ball on a cart path. The car stopped, blinking angry red tail lights and a door opened spilling a teetering man onto the pavement. His head was bleeding as disbelief flooded over his body. She moved closer to the scene, afraid of everything, including the pile of humanity prone on the hood of the late model Lexus. Walking as though dreaming, the driver's voice came through as if in a fog mumbling something about drunks and their place in the world. Standing with the door in her hand, the cracked windshield had blood racing down it and his face with his closed eyes and shredded skin became unrecognizable.

Ten minutes
Distillation...
My lunch break was cut short due to the exploded juice in my bag. Goddamn eco-friendly non-toxic paper thin containers. Bring back the can and bottle. I'm all for saving the Earth and leaving the ice for the polar bears, but this green movement is over the top. Soaps that don't clean. Herbs that don't cure. Plastic that doesnt cling. Food that doesnt taste. Toothpaste that encourages cavities. Stain that doesnt stain. Gas that smells like french fries. It's a consuming world and we are at the top of the food chain looking down on the spotted owl, the wood frog, the bald eagle and the third world. We covet, we desire, want bigger better faster more and the future be damned. I don't have kids or brothers, sisters or family so, Yes I am a cynical self serving ego-centric thorn in the side of today's society. I don't care. I live my life my own way. I don't toss cigarettes out my window or trash the sidewalks but I do drive everywhere, eat tuna, smoke pot, spend money on frivolous non-renewable products, gamble and have been known to shoot a squirrel or two with a BB gun. It's not a crime to be ignorant nor is it as uncommon as you greenies may think as most people only do the right thing because of public perception. Well, FUCK THAT. We're not all angels and most of us don't desire to be. We are products of our own making, a factory rife with pollutants populating the world with would-be do-gooders with the devil on every shoulder.


Eight minutes
In my pocket...
Is the general flotsam and jetsam of any given day, but on every day ending in a "y" is cash and a tube of hemp lip balm. I'm addicted to both in the worst way. I feel utterly and completely naked without my folded bills in the left front pocket and lip goo over there on the right. If I'm wearing shorts, they cohabitate. If I'm swimming they stay home in the locker/car/backpack. They get along as well as two addictions can, being wholly independent of each other and existing in separate but overlapping universes. If it wasn't for my pants, they would have nothing whatsoever in common and might possibly jump ship and strike out on their own. My faith in them though is unwavering and steadfast. I will be less likely to leave the house without clothes on then I am to leave without my two friends. They are a part of me, a single line in the multiple page description of who I am, two small inanimate objects living in a pocket.

It's that time of the decade when we do battle with the networks about television coverage of the olympics, and I have to say, that this year's edition is about the worst I've ever seen. It's bad enough that we have to watch tape delayed coverage from across the globe when the events are held multiple time zones away, but why the three hour lapse in coverage when it's on the west coast of our very own country?
MONEY, my friends, pure and simple.
The olympics are about spirit, the brotherhood of humanity and the dreams of athletes worldwide. They are not about money, yet NBC has turned a premium sporting event into their own personal pinata, busting the coverage for the sake of gathering all the dollar bills they can that fall to the floor. I am as pro american as the next guy but when all I see from NBC is the good ol stars and stripes in competition I begin to wonder if I'm watching the nationals instead of the worldwide olympics. Rarely has so few countries been so poorly represented as at these games. We see lindsey, we see shaun and his boyz, we see apollo and his protege, we see the figure skaters likely to win gold, but do we see any other competitors in any detail? Nope, we get snippets of competition and unlikely stories told in sidelights, we get highlights from the 'rest of the field'. We get more commercials than the superbowl and for what? taped delayed coverage that if you had any interest at all in following you would be better off perusing the internet for scores and highlights.
It's a wonderful event that NBC prez Dick Ebersol said is going to lose money for his network. Well, I can't say I feel sorry for dick, because his worry is not my problem as all I want to see is some unbiased coverage of what is supposed to be the greatest stage in the world for its athletes. And what is Cris Collingsworth doing commentating snowboarding???? Does he know anything about the sport?
So much for biased commentating as NBC has working the biggest set of 'homers' this side of chicago and harry caray. I guess I'm cranky because we watch so little tv and what we do watch we like to be entertained by and not talked down to, or told who to root for, or be part of that great american machine that we are made out to be.
The olympics ARE fun to watch, but not on NBC.

We live in a temporary society doing temporary jobs in a temporary world, so when I get a chance to see something permanent and timeless, I stand in awe. We went out to the coast on valentine's day to get away from the concrete jungle and wallow in the immensity of the ocean. It had been too long since either of us had been there, and the beauty with which we were assaulted was amazing. The sky was littered with cottonballs, and the vast blueness of the pacific was like a riffling bedsheet. The swells could be seen from far away as we crested the coast mountains and began our descent into Cannon Beach for our day of rest, relaxation and fun in the sun.
At Oswaldt state park we left the subaru and with truman and abby began the walk thru the old growth cedar forest to the beach. Oswaldt is a big bay, framed by Cape Falcon (cheers dane) on the one side, an anonymous point on the other. The deep swells from the far reaches of the pacific filter in here, growing taller as the seafloor rises up the closer it gets to the continent. At high tide the beach was fairly nonexistent, but there was still plenty of room to roam and to listen to the thunder of the gods coming to rest against the oregon coast. It was loud, discombobulated, and chaotic, frothy whitewater everywhere with breakers screaming against gravity from one end of the bay to the other.
What I love most about the ocean is its vastness. It has an empty quality to it that stands in direct contrast to the amount of life that depends on it...for sustenance, for mental clarity, for spiritual healing, for global cooling (:) ). The ocean is always there, an eternal friend and while sitting on a driftwood log, I realized that I dont ever want to live far from the ocean again. We live two hours away, but it is WORLDS away in my opinion, a distinct class of people live in the city while another entirely different race lives out there on the edge, near the bubbling, gurgling, breathing, violent, roiling, frothy continental edge. I like it out there, love it, and cant believe I'm not out there right now.
There is the timelessness that I need. The permanence in this world, the permanence of change is what the ocean represents and to leave the world of buildings, cars, people, hustlebustle is as healing to the mind body and soul as a soothing full body massage and a glass of wine. What it is is finding your place, finding your place where it all comes together in one point of the compass. I know where my place is, have always known, but it takes living away from that point to realize it.

In the everyday adventures of the big city unemployed, I come into contact with a bevy of different professionals doing their "professional" work, refusing to be pigeonholed into the normalcy of the working world. I popped in on a medical clinic, where girls in slinky socks and clogs mingled with secretaries wearing highnecked sweaters and gstrings, who were either acupuncturists, herbal doctors, massage technicians, or possibly even plain janes who fell into a job on the temp service site of craigslist. I stopped in to a tall building downtown, across from Powell's universe of books where I go weekly to volunteer to file random things in an ancient cabinet and there were three women and a tall smile laced man who greeted me warmly. They were curious people, asking about my day and how I was. I dropped off a CycleDeli menu in the hopes that they would order next week, but these are writers working for a nonprofit who hoard their money for books, new releases, a bottle of nice wine, and maybe a new pair of Dansco clogs for the upcoming anthology release party. Then I crossed Burnside and down into Oldtown, where my friend Sam (not the woman who lets me live with her) works in an old building with lots of windows and a habittrail of hallways and stairwells. He is a internet guru, a web designer who surfs the web like Laird Hamilton surfs pipeline. He showed me the set up, showed me the conference rooms with handmade (from recycled doors!) tables, the huge windows, the dominating Vaio video monitors on the wall and all of the young, hip, urban, funky folk who live and work there. A coworker was shovelling some food into his mouth from a styrofoam togo box, while an uneaten slice of pizza the size of a dinner plate sat untouched in front of his buddy to the left.
The point is that all of these people that I came into contact with are living the life of a professional, whether they want to be called that or not. I have never considered myself a professional, and only just recently became aware of the fact that I have/had a career. What seems funny to me is that in my former life of an Alaskan, there were very few "professionals" in my immediate world, most of whom would be reluctant to call themselves that for fear of being labeled an "adult". Most of my friends and associates were what I would call "workers", able to do most any job capably and some jobs quite proficiently. We weren't professionals at all, just people trying to get by and make some money so that we could hang out together, and bitch about working. PeterPan syndrome, I believe is what some call this infatuation with staying young and refusing to grow up, but the ability and desire to try new things, to avoid the rut of putting in years of servitude is what keeps us young not the refusal to grow up because I like my graying hair and expanding belly. I am a cook, that's what I am, but because I refuse to scale the ladder of success in that field, I find the word professional offensive.
The move down into this professional world has always felt at odds with who I am. When I was cooking here, I felt like I had to prove my worth in the cooking community and act the part of a respected professional in my class. Well, that's just not who I am and maybe that was why that experiment didn't last very long. I'm still a kid trying to get used to the idea that I have a career and a house and a fiance and a dog and a car and a stock portfolio. I also have a 31 year old woman living with me who insists that I stay young forever because she doesnt want an old man cramping her style.

The sun comes out along Tom McCall waterfront park in February and you would think the asylum had just opened its doors and released the patients. Airplanes buzzed overhead in continuous circles, spying on the traffic, the river, and the pulse of humanity wandering down the promenade. The kids at the USS Oregon war memorial packed their loaded apple and celebrated 4:20 a few hours early. An old black guy with a grizzled beard and milky eyes talked to his burrito while cannibalizing it at the same time. All the black clad youth stood in stark contrast to the blue sky and ghostly pallor of their exposed skin. Vampires exposed, warmth and summer on the way, slinking back into their five month coffins. Grass slithery with perceived wetness and the first traces of brave joggers without gloves and hats. Bike path brisk with noontime walkers, strollers, bikers, strutters and the pillars of any waterfront public space, the homeless.
I felt especially good today, having done my volunteer shift at Oregon Public Broadcasting (yep, im answering phones for their pledge drive:)!), made my first batch of lunches for my new business empire, the cycle deli, and then did more volunteer work filing papers and reading essays for my group Write Around Portland. A busy day. And now, as my gin sits sweating on a coaster, im thinking about going to the blazer game with samantha. We have yet to go to a game, and mr durant and his Thunder are in town, so it should be a nice pasting by the visitors.
I do have to say, that things are looking up...we have irises blooming in the front, along with crocus', and inside is a burgeoning hyacynth as well as a chia pet.
Our new fish Masta (who is a beta) is living comfortably in his cracked glass bowl while a stalk of bamboo springs out of his house, swimming his circles and eating blood worms to satisfy his sushi craving.

Today just may be the first day of the rest of my life. last night while sitting on the couch contemplating my inherent idleness, sam and I came up with 'the next BIG thing'. It is an idea borne out of simplicity, necessity, and mr zappa's mother's of invention, an idea that transcends restaurants and food carts, drive thru fast food and sack lunches. It takes elements from all aspects of food service and wraps it into one tidy little package called...MATTY'S CYCLE DELI...hows that for a catchy name?
The more we started to think about it the bigger it got, and the better it became, and the more money we were making, and before you knew it, we were vacationing half the year in Mexico with our own private palapa and getting hitched on the beach with all of our friends enjoying rounds of tequila and beer on us. It went that fast. But truth be told, reality is a nice brisk headwind when starting a new business, and this one will be no different.
My goal is to provide a healthy, quality alternative to those people in the workplace with not enough time to go out and grab something, as well as those folks who have exhausted the lunch choices within walking distance of their places of employment. I want to make sandwiches that buck the 'subway' norm, push people out of their comfort zone by not giving them a choice, but rather forcing themselves to trust me in my creativity. Their only choice will be vegetarian or meat. I'll do the rest of the work for them. Check either box on the order sheet and your sandwich will be delivered the next day. Of course, this won't be an everyday job, god forbid, but what I'm hoping for is to develop enough of a client base where I make three deliveries to three different locales three days a week of between 10-20 sandwiches per delivery. I'm thinking 45 sandwiches a day, three days a week at twelve bucks a pop...what is that? nearly five bills a week, and doing deliveries on my bike with a rack (a very large one apparently)and a smile.
I love making sandwiches, it just might be my favorite food, and the scope of variety is endless so not only will I not get bored, but neither will my customers. I've been sitting around far too long this winter trying to figure out what to do with my time, and I think I may have hit the nail on the head with this one. It's a simple idea made