Asymptomatic

I've been subscribed to @sfshorts on Twitter, which is not about short pants worn in San Fransisco. No, it's a micro-fiction publication run by my friend ElizabethN and her friend (and someone I know online) preinheimer, wherein they publish a full science fiction story within the space of 1 or 2 tweets -- that's a full sci-fi story within 280 characters.

Micro-fiction seems like a great medium for people that aren't as invested in the whole effort of writing, but it offers some challenges of its own. Stylistically, one of the rules seems to be no txt-speak; You can't abbreviate every little thing to make your stories longer. And still, it has to make sense.

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When I started writing this blog way back in the ancient times, I was using it to write. Sure, a lot of it was opiniony stuff, but there were a few poems and stories. It's something I enjoy doing.

Over the years, I've kind of stopped posting that stuff here. I think this is primarily because I think the audience of my site here would be confused about it. When I have posted fiction in the past amidst regular opinionated content, it has seriously confused regular readers, who have commented in what reads to me as humorous, but really isn't a kind way to treat readers.

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My writing queue is a mile long, and a year overdue. I've got ideas aplenty, a paradox of choice, and an imagined readership (not in its quantity, but its consistency) that demands perfection.

I've just noticed, moments ago, that the blogs I most enjoy reading these days are short. Three paragraphs convey their entire message. Most of the time, the message is a simple impression. You read it and you feel... a certain way. It's like sense memory -- a whiff of a stranger's prose puts you in a familiar place.

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There are these creatures that live under my porch, and up until yesterday, they were quite friendly with me.

When I first noticed them, I thought that someone had dropped a sack of potatoes near the walkway to the front door. They were each about the size of a potato, with brown mottled skin, not unlike the textrue of a potato. They had very small eyes that were entirely pupil sunk into their noseless faces. Each had a pair of twig-like legs and arms, and some of them carried twigs sharpened into potato-people-sized spears. They seemed altogether shocked when I happened upon them.

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Before we moved into the house that I still live in, we lived in a half-double next to the paper mill on Logan Avenue.

One of the best things about the house on Logan was the large parking lot in which the trucks used to park their trailers between the loading and unloading of recycled paper. My brother and I used to ride our bikes around the lot with other kids in our neighborhood, circling the trailers. For a gift I was given a bicycle odometer to keep track of the many miles that I pedaled around that asphalt lot.

There was also a weighing station, and if you looked in the booth that was attached to the truck-sized scale, you could see a red LED gauge of how many tons your bike weighed. A certain truck had once dropped a large bundle of colored paper chits that were likely due to be recycled. We found these pieces near the scale, assigned them all some value, and called them "Moon Money".

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