So this morning I dug through a box of stuff I've kept from mine and Brent's middle school and high school years. I was looking for a sheet of titles from a game of sorts we played in high school. I say of sorts because it wasn't a game as in there was an objective, but it was a game as in we all had titles and there were rules. It was odd, but it was harmless and we all had a good time with it. So anyway...I thought I had kept the list of titles over the years and if I had it would be in that box. I had and it was.
It was in a binder that I have the very few pictures from that time frame, none of them from school, camp and tours only. Cameras just weren't toted around everywhere like they are now. Which is sad. I wish like crazy I had pictures of people from those time frames. Also in that binder were things people had made for me. Sketches that Chad did, notes and letters from Brent, a few Van Halen logos which could have been done by anyone of us. We had VH on EVERYTHING back then. And then a smallish collection of bad poetry and story ideas and starts.
I say smallish because I know that they were weeded out at one point. Things were tossed and things were kept. I have no idea what I used to make the decision because most of the stuff in that binder was dreck. But at some point it was the best of what I had. Or it meant the most to me. One of the things that made me smile was one poem that was fairly long that on other pieces and notes I had the same poem started 4 or 5 times. That first line was in my head for a long time before I turned it in to something else. There was also the start of a song. The only song I've ever tried writing. I can still remember the tune. The problem is I don't write music. I don't know anything about how to write music. So song writing wasn't really a calling for me. But I kept that one attempt.
So much poetry. I wrote a lot of poetry. And I kept a lot of it. I feel like I should print it all here so Skippy understands that the bad poetry I write now is actually outstanding poetry on the sliding scale. I won't, because, oh lord it was bad poetry. Hormones and drama and free verse...not a good combination.
I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Writing or just telling stories. I used to make them up on the fly while we were on the bus traveling. You have to remember that there were no smart phones or hand held video games. You listened to your walkman if you had one, and not a lot of us did, you read if you didn't get car sick or you figured out ways to entertain yourself. Telling stories was one of my ways. It would be nice to have some of those back. There was a scary story that had a punch line of e-i-e-i-o that had the bus in suspense and then mad laughter, there was a ghost story about La Llorona that terrified an entire girls dorm up at camp, there were others too. But I don't remember much about them. Usually just a few lines. Or the laughter when the ghost did the e-i-e-i-o bit...
It's good to remember and to touch that writing sometimes. To see not only that I have gotten better, that helps on days when words don't want to come or the crisis of talent hits and I want to delete everything. But also to see that is a part of me. It has been part of me for a long time. Even when I had to let it go due to time and I didn't feel like a writer at all I was still making up stories in games for C and telling stories at work about baby corn and confidence issues. Trust me that one slayed...
I packed everything back up in to the binder then in to the box. It will all go away again until someday when I'm looking for something else out there. And I will look through it all again and cringe at most of it, and think, yeah, there was something here for some of it. And hopefully remember the tune to my one song. And maybe someday someone else will find the early writings of the famous author Denise Mastenbrook and think...
Oh thank fuck she got better!
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