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Out of concern, dear reader, for your quality of life, not everything I write actually makes it to print.
If you have a creative hobby or job, you will understand what I mean.
One day you create something, look it over, and believe it has value and worth. But this is just a delusion on your part because the next morning, the sunlight of truth, instead of showing off the glitter and glam of your creation, only reveals to you its flaws and many imperfections. Suddenly, what you were going to share is thrust into a closet with all the other artistic skeletons you have placed there.
Surely, something can be salvaged! Maybe an appendage or bone from my artistic skeletons can be excised, shared and appreciated? Let’s open the door to that creaky closet and take a look.
I blow the dust off some bones and see one called “Chariots of Ice.” The premise for this column was something I called a stayathon, where contestants, instead of running a marathon, just hung out at the finish line. Whoever was the last person to stay and not leave won the race that went nowhere. This race would take days, I surmised, to complete, especially if the winner received a lot of prize money. Here is a finger from that skeleton:
Training for the stayathon is rigorous. For weeks on end, these endurance stayers practice milling about a small, cordoned-off area for hours.
Race organizers conduct a blood drive at the start/finish line to help pass the time.
I push aside several skeletons and re-read a column that explored the history of medicine cabinets. I did a lot of research for this piece of rubbish, but only the collarbone is salvageable:
Kastner goes on to say that medicine cabinets exist to store — and hide from prying eyes — what we use on or in our body. Kastner even confesses that looking into someone’s medicine cabinet offers him “an opportunity for a vicarious kind of real intimacy with the person whose stuff is in it. It does give you a window on things that your host may or may not wish to share with you about their health and their bodies.”
Note to self: If I ever invite Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of Cabinet, over to my house, I’ll be sure to fill my medicine cabinet with a hundred marbles.
Though many of the skeletons are whole, representing full drafts of muck I worked on, many are incomplete. Here is the ribcage of an essay called “Time Crimes”:
I knock on the door where the brown wreath is hung. A man opens it and I flash my badge.
“Afternoon, sir. My name is Joe Thursday and I’m with the Faux Pax Police, Decorative Division.”
“Afternoon,” the man says. “Have I done something wrong?”
“Is this brown, dried-out, very dead wreath with a gnarled red bow on it yours?”
“Yes,” he admits. He bows his head in embarrassment.
“Do you know what month it is?”
“July.”
“This time I’ll just give you a warning, but I need that twisted circle of sticks to come down today.”
He promises to take the “greenery,” which is now “brownery,” off his door. As I start to turn around to head back to my squad car, he says, “I guess my celebration of the holidays got a little carried away.”
“Next time, just wreath responsibly, and you won’t ever see me again.”
Sitting down now among the bones, I spy a kneecap behind a skull. It’s all that’s left of a column that was going to be about perspective.
I recently saw a humorously depressing bumper sticker that read: “In dog years, I’m dead.” I reworked it to make me feel better. “In giant land tortoise years, I’m 30.”
Holding the kneecap in my hand, I have a dangerous idea. Maybe someday I’ll come back and put some flesh on this bone.
But not now. I have plenty of time to do that. Like the stayathoners, these skeletons aren’t going anywhere.
