Month: March 2014

I wrote this today:

Time travel can be like this: it fractures cause and effect, confuses the linear patterns that seem to govern our lives, and makes a patchwork of our memories, ripped and torn at unexpected seams. You remember things that never happened; you get a life you never lived. Take Abraham, for instance.

“I’m going to write a story about a time machine,” Abraham says. “It’s a mechanical device for traveling to the past that will become its own blueprint when future generations read it.”

“You’ll have to get it published first,” Laura says. She likes Abraham but doesn’t know when or where this talk of writing and time machines started. He still hasn’t even graduated high school. “Hand me that mop,” she says. “Somebody broke a jar of pickles in aisle six.”

“That isn’t a problem,” Abraham says, meaning the story of the time machine, of course. Laura has to reach past him to grab the mop. “I just have to write the right story and the time machine will exist. It will always have existed. And they’ll send it back to meet me.”

Laura likes Abraham. When he first started working here at the start of summer, she thought he was kind of cute. But he has some pretty weird notions, and this time travel business is just the latest.

“Is that important to you?” she asks. She heads back out to the front of the store, toting the bucket and mop, and Abraham follows. “A visit from the future?”

“I want to know how the story ends,” he tells her.

“Black holes are basically time machines,” she says. It’s something she read, maybe for class, maybe not, she doesn’t remember. She knows she probably shouldn’t be humoring him, adding fuel to this fire, but the night shifts are long, and dull except for broken jars of pickles, so she says it. “Maybe your time machine should be built out of a black hole.”

I’m not exactly pleased with it, but sometimes that’s the nature of the beast: you struggle through forty minutes of free-writing only to have nothing much at all to show for it. I’m not saying there isn’t the start of some kind of story buried in this somewhere, just that, if there is, it’s well buried indeed. But in writing, even the wrong words are better than no words.

I’m not watching the Oscars this evening, though I can’t claim to have made a better choice by watching A Good Day to Die Hard. It’s easily the worst movie in the series, rarely even rising to the level of interesting, and I can only imagine how ridiculous any sixth movie in the Die Hard franchise would have to be.

A violent mega-storm threatens to wipe out the entire east coast, but it didn't count one NYC cop in…A Die Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall.

— Fred Coppersmith (@unrealfred) March 3, 2014

A young John McClane is the only thing standing between ghost pirates at the old mill and their treasure in…The Die Hardy Boys.

— Fred Coppersmith (@unrealfred) March 3, 2014

Can one lone cop foil a terrorist plot while also working his way up from the mail room in…Working Die Hard or Die Hardly Working?

— Fred Coppersmith (@unrealfred) March 3, 2014

I probably should have spent the evening writing. Even more bad words would have been better than this.