The end of the circus day was the only time she had to herself anymore.  Between the families and children who bothered her during the day and the unruly circus roadies who threw rocks at her trailer at night, there was no rest anymore, just solitude.  But judging by the heavy footsteps she could hear approaching outside, even that was a lost cause tonight.

The rusty tin door crashed open, letting in a burst of stinky elephant poop wind from the big top.  Alexandra’s father, Sergei, stood in the door licking a knife and pointing at her a lot, in the way that infers that you, the person being pointed at, are next.  She was the only person in her trailer, so the pointing was basically unnecessary, but he seemed to enjoy the theatrics.

“How many people did you make laugh today, Alexandra?” her father asked between licks.

She told him fourteen.  The licking stopped abruptly.

“Fourteen.  Pitiful.  That is but five percent of our daily ticket sales, Alexandra.  What kind of shitty clown can only muster five percent of laughter?”

She assumed it was a rhetorical question and continued smearing the last splotches of white from her neck.  Sergei hiked his sagging pants and lumbered over to her, pointer finger fixed like a laser.  He slid the dull edge of the knife’s back down her cheek, leaving a trail of slobber as it moved.  She refused to give him the satisfaction of looking at him, even though he was now trying to do that obnoxious double point from his eyes to hers in the mirror.

“We know what happens when we don’t reach our daily laugh quota, don’t we Alexandra?”

She totally knew, but obstained from nodding.  He flipped the knife in his hand and nicked her cheek in one fell swoop.  A slight string of blood trickled down her cheek, diluting in the saliva tracks her father’s knife had left behind.  It didn’t hurt, really.  Not anymore than the others.  She calmly lifted one of her gloved hands and used the thick foam lycra to wipe her cheek.

Sergei licked the blade clean of his daughter’s blood and awkwardly slid it back into his fanny pack, even though the knife was slightly too long and had to go in at a diagonal.  He zipped it as far as he could and then turned his attention back to his daughter.

“There is nothing funny about what I do to you, Alexandra.  You know this.  Tomorrow, be better.  It is the only way.”

The trailer buoyed slightly as he stepped back out into the night, leaving Alexandra with her quiet.  The cut on her face started bleeding again, and she held the sponge to her face to soak up the last few drops.  The banging of rocks landed on the roof of the trailer, and she could hear some derogatory yelling and a pick-up squeal off in the distance.

Alexandra flipped the switch on the side of the mirror and the make-up bulbs blinked off.  She looked pretty good in the darkness, the same way she looked pretty good with all that clown make-up on.  She smiled at the shadowy reflection in the mirror, stood up from her stool and went to lay down on the burlap cot that she called a bed.  As she lay there staring at the dented tin ceiling of her ramshackle home, the dull pain in her cheek throbbed just enough to provide a little internal rhythm to lull her to sleep.

That night, she dreamed of what her life would have been if she’d just finished that last semester of med school.

Jeff sat back in his leather office chair, arms satisfactorily rested behind his head, and let out a sigh.  Goddamn, he’d done it.  He’d written the ultimate novel about a writer writing a novel.  Sure, Stephen King had been coming close to perfecting the formula for years, but Jeff Mandel?  Jeff Mandel nailed it in one shot.

The secret, he realized, was that the writer in his story should be just like him.  We’re talking an average guy, someone everyone can relate to, but also really handsome in a noticeable way.  And the writer should be trying to write a novel, just like him.  But that’s where the twist comes in, because the writer gets some extreme writer’s block that just totally incapacitates him.  So instead of writing, the writer sits pensively for hours and reflects on his life up until that point, trying to find inspiration.  Real solid stuff, the kind that can go on for two hundred pages of adjectives alone.

Jeff made sure to click Save As, even though his copy of OpenOffice had document recovery should the program crash.  He clicked open his browser and ran a Google search for the word “publishers” to see if he could find some contact information on where to send this thing.  Boy, when his childhood friends go walking down the rows of books at their local B.Dalton, and they see Jeff’s name up there right next to Toni Morrison and Dan Brown?  They’re going to lose their shit.  They’ll be commenting all over his Facebook wall about it, attracting attention to the book, which will lead other people to comment and ask about it and then Jeff will have to write a whole blog post about it.  It’s just going to be a mess, really.

But then they’ll read it, and they’ll understand how important the work is.  That’s why he wrote the book, after all: to shine a light on the anguish of the common writer.  He was originally about eight pages into a mostly non-fiction novel about his opinions on Barrack Obama, but he scrapped it when he realized that he wasn’t really a political beast.  If anything, he’s like the stand-up comedian of the written world, just observing and riffing on the things that we all already know, but don’t really know (in italics).

They’ll know soon, he thought, because I’ll tell them (in italics).

He went to open another blank document to start a Contacts spreadsheet, but his cursor stopped before he could reach the File menu.  His computer had frozen again.  But it gave him a chance to reread the last few lines he had just written.  It all seemed to wrap up so nicely, which life so rarely ever does for people.  If anything, life is super tragic, and it would be a betrayal of truth for his fiction to depict anything but tragedy as an ending.  He nodded his head in agreement with himself until the cursor started moving again, upon which he promptly highlighted the last sentence and hit delete, except that he accidentally missed the letters “th” of the word “the” and had to manually backspace a little further.  He started typing again.

“The writer’s block finally gone, David sat down to write his hit novel, which would also serve as his suicide note because he would kill himself soon after.  The end.”

Jeff leaned back again, pretty much satisfied.  It just felt so much more real than that other trite thing he’d written before.  He clicked over to see what Google had found, but the first three links were all for the Publisher’s Clearing House.  He laughed silently at the irony of the search result.  Didn’t the Internet know that he had already won the lottery just by finishing this novel? (in italics)

The auto save feature kicked in and he closed his laptop for the night.  It had been a long Sunday, writing this damned book.  And as ideas for his follow-up project swirled through his head, Jeff dozed off, content that he had changed the world.

This one SEEMS finished-ISH, but it’s not.  The Fat Lady is from 2007 and was a part of my swirl phase, where I used swirls prominently in most of my pieces.  Still do sometimes.  Still can’t draw cats.  So sue me.

For more Stuff I Never Finished, click here!

This guy’s called “Space Ain’t No Joke.”  Which is true.  When there are dinosaurs out in space, and all you have is a sword?!  GOOD LUCK.

This latest one, this problem, was like the others; an older woman, two months shy of 25 but with the upper arms of a 19-year-old. And like the others, she was drawn in by Ripper’s natural charisma. The boy was a prodigy of sexual magnetism, his mysterious eyes piercing the souls of women like a knife slowly pushing into a balloon, except without the pop.

That he was three had not yet come up in conversation, and he appreciated that. Normally, it was the focal point; conquest after conquest breaking down in tears during post coital snuggling with vocal attempts at self-consolation. “You’re too young!” they’d cry. Or “I can’t do this!” Or “my husband is waiting in the car!” But Diane seemed utterly unphased by his youth or the questionable legality of the situation.

“I’ve had younger,” she’d say between puffs of the giant novelty cigar she would occasionally pull out and wiggle around by her mouth. It was said as a point of pride, and Ripper imagined her sitting down with a checklist numbered one through a hundred, slowly ticking off each year as she slept her way through a century. For a three year old, it was a surprisingly abstract thought.

Her cavalier attitude made the sex all the more interesting. She would lay in bed motionless, sometimes half asleep, letting Ripper slip and slide his way around her body. It was a freedom he was unaccustomed to, as most women ravaged him before he could make a move, tearing through pair after pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls with a wild abandon normally reserved for hungry cocker spaniels. Now he had independence, and the gratification could come at his pace for once. They made love all night long, really hard, and long past Ripper’s bed time.

Ripper instinctually woke up at 10:15 the morning after and began to write his obligatory thank you note, courteous without being a tease. But he stopped himself, unable to muster the words that would push away this miracle woman. A single tear welled up in his eye, the first of its kind not brought about by a temper tantrum or an accidental poop. Emotions like these were for five year olds, he thought. Not him.

Wiping away the remnants of feeling, Ripper noticed the pile of sheets at his feet where Diane was supposed to be. And then he felt it; the gentle scratch of ribbon around his ankle and the wet rose stem that was almost as long as the leg to which it was attached. Diane knew his tricks, or had stumbled across the same foolproof way out on her own. Either way, she broke his little heart without so much as a word.

Now he knew what it felt like. Ripper grabbed his favorite stuffed doggy, rolled over and, finally letting his age catch up to him, cried like a baby.

When I first moved to Chicago, I had very little going on.  Very, very little.  To fill the void and satiate my desire to write, I began producing a short series called InformaShawn.  It’s exactly what it sounds like: wildly useful video-based information that can help you change your life.

I managed to keep it up for 9 episodes before growing lazy, with a bonus 10th episode that resurfaced some months later.  I have more sitting in a drawer that can hopefully get pulled out again soon.  For now, enjoy the original series on one easy-to-scroll page.

Keep Your Kids Inside

#2 – The Financial Crisis
(aka my first and last attempt at topicality)

#3 – An Apple A Day

#4 – The Bi-Cycle

#5 – The Challenge of Being African-American

#6 – Positively Purple

#7 – If I Were A Fish

#8 – The World’s First Americans

#9 – The History of Tits pt. 1

#10 – The First ShawnformaShawn

Our final project was to “do something with sound design.”  So I said “I’ll do something with voiceover, because then I don’t have to know how to record live audio.”  I also said “I could do something stupid and boring or I can make something that entertains me and graduate regardless.”  Here, watch Cranial Mechanica:

(Post script: I got an A…take THAT, sound engineers)

That the hat had been left with such literal abandon was unsurprising, as Matt often left objects unattended in their respective baths to prune, which had thus far ruined all of his living room furniture and a good portion of his slack collection. The slack bath broke down from overheating before he could finish the damage.

At hour two, the top hat began showing symptoms of shrivel.

At hour three, the hat had absorbed most of the water from the hat bath, leaving the crumpled corpse of the once illustrious chapeau a soggy mess that not even a hobo would salvage.

At hour seven, Matt returned from his frisbee golf tournament to find his raisin of a top hat, not so much bathed as manslaughtered through negligence. He skimmed the hat bath and the hat bath box, unsure as he always was with the baths as to where it all had gone awry.

Defeated, he dropped his frisbee in the disc bath and took a seven hour nap.