FAILING

(A prompt taken from Bonni Goldberg and her book, Room To Write)

PROMPT: Today, write a full page of junk. It can be trite, repetitive, vague, clunky, melodramatic, gibberish, the worst stuff you can muster. Read it over and notice all the elements you understand about writing through the intentional ways you wrote against them. Now crumple, tear, or delete the page and toss it in the trash. Since this is a blog and the purpose of posting is for everyone to see, I'll just never look at this post again ... HAHA

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"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ~~ Samuel Beckett
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Life was boring in this small town so I hitched a ride with the first car that stopped and climbed inside over the torn leather seats and a busted dash even though the inside smelled like a year old stash of fast food. Well, would you look at that? A pile of McDonald's bags and cups that looked at least as old as dirt. You should have seen the guy behind the wheel. He was tall with giant hands that looked swollen. He had a big belly, but he was thin and the black t-shirt with holes through the midsection didn't help him out. And seriously was that an eight track tape player? How did I even know what an eight track tape player was? I'm only seventeen. He smiled a toothy grin and almost like bit his bottom lip off. This guy had to have fallen out of some incest tree. He asked me where I was going and I told him I didn't care as long as it was far from here so he pushed down on the gas pedal and sped down the road, at somewhere around forty miles an hour. The sun glared off the wet pavement and I put my and over my eyes to shield from that glaring light. I tried to ignore the paper bag in the back floor board with the dark congealed stains and the pile of fabric that laid inside. A baby doll was back there too and I couldn't stop myself from turning back to look at him, but it was already too late and I saw him swing the tire iron over his head as it hit mine and the darkness swallowed my thoughts before the questions could leave my lips.