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Very short stories to read at the bus stop.
Posted by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. Xalieri
Heh. She seems cheerful enough to me.... :)
This was an exercise in "who you are determines what you see". Boredom is mostly a failure to engage. If all you do is sit back and watch, you lose interest if you can't get involved.
The scene of people snorting saccharine was a scene from my own memories. Friends and friends of friends were mocking coke-heads they all knew, taking turns making lines of sweetener on a mirrored tile with a college student ID card, making a show of rolling up a $1 bill instead of a twenty or a fifty for a particular individual who had financial difficulties caused by his drug use, making faces and mimicking voices and catch-phrases.... These people define for me the image of people having fun at a party. They were having a blast. Many of them refer back to that moment fifteen years later as a source of inside jokes.
The point (in my head, since I have access to info that didn't make it into the story) was how the goddess of ennui here would miss that entirely, or at least fail to assign it any lasting value.
An idea I have, either for a novel or a collection of short stories, is to have fifteen to twenty people involved in the same life-changing scene, but describe how each of them experienced it through their own filters. I haven't done any real work on it yet, but a lot of the scenes I've written with bunches of people in them have that underlying idea soaking into the strata....
Sometimes I have the problem attributed to Kafka. Some of the stuff I write that is seen as dark, I see as kinda (or really) funny, and it only comes out when I read the stories out loud. If you can find a copy of Kafka reading "The Metamorphosis" I really recommend it. :)
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I'll try and find it
Maybe the dark thing was a kind of transferrence
... and sometimes I lose track of my tone. The last three paragraphs are possibly a bit more harsh than they need to be to get the point across, now that I look at it again....
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