Month: August 2011

It poured rain for most of today.

I didn’t sleep terrifically last night, still feeling some of the effects of the Allegra, which will probably take a couple of days to fully work itself out of my system. If my allergies continue to be bad in another week or so — and my red and itchy eye, cough, and persistent sneezing suggest they just might — I may try the Claritin again, since the active ingredient’s different, and in the past I’ve taken it without incident. But the other still has me feeling a little antsy at times, and it’s a feeling I don’t really enjoy.

I spent the day working (though not yet finishing) the Sunday crossword and watching Torchwood (just awful) and Breaking Bad (terrific, though not, y’know, in any way calming). I also went out to Huntington for my weekly writing group. We spent several hours, my friend and I, talking about books and movies and TV, discussing our writing, and I wrote this:

Jake stares at the hypnotic display of readouts on the wavecycle’s computer screen, wishing, not for the first time, that he had paid closer attention in that morning’s flight class. He knows, almost instinctively, and from the pressure readings up and down the arms of his own flight suit, that the cycle wasn’t built for altitudes like this. The wind shear alone would have sent a saner man back to the ground. There are already ice crystals starting to form along the front engine block, and probably more on the underside of the cycle, away from even that much radiant heat. But Jake doesn’t know what any of the lights on the computer display actually mean — if a flashing red bar indicates danger, if a blinking yellow number suggests the fuel reserves are running low, if a swirling block of taupe means —

Who the hell designs a computer readout in taupe?

Jake knows he shouldn’t be this high up, but short of the fiery obvious, he doesn’t know how to reunite the wavecycle with the ground. The radio’s been shorted out for at least a thousand feet, not even static; and while he’s somehow managed to slow his ascent, Jake and the cycle are still rising. Soon enough, he’ll have to switch to the oxygen tanks to keep breathing, and soon after that the oxygen will run out altogether, seeing as how the tanks both are less than half-filled and Jake’s never mastered that Zen-like slow-breathing crap they tried spoon-feeding them in flight class. If Jake can’t figure out how to turn the cycle back around, and soon, he’s going to run out of air, and ice crystals are going to start forming on his underside as well.

He thinks back to that morning, less than two hours ago now, and his stupid insistence on taking the wavecycle out on a solo flight. Captain Demond hadn’t been looking for volunteers, but Jake had volunteered all the same. He wasn’t looking to get up in the air so much as for an excuse to get off the base. The wavecycle itself quite frankly bored him, archaic and clunky in its design, largely abandoned by most of the branches in favor of larger troop transports or more aerodynamic aerial attack craft. It was old and looked unstable, just another random relic dumped here with all the rest. But it would take him up and out, and that morning Jake had somewhere else he desperately needed to be.

This was more a writing exercise than a piece I’d develop into anything else. There are lots of places it could go, sure, but nothing I feel really compelled, or even particularly interested, to write. It was more for the practice of crafting sentences, rhythms, phrasing, that kind of thing, than the development of any real story. Sometimes that’s all these are, but sometimes that’s good enough.