day 1

first paragraph on teh first day. 769 words total. not that I'm trying to break a word record. I'm trying to write a story. and I have officially begun.


I want to stress, first of all, that I am ordinary. Perhaps you will have trouble with this fact but I swear to you it is a fact. At first glance this may run contrary to everything that has happened up to this point. At first glance this may make your brain bleed when you think about it, but let me be clear from the start, I am an ordinary man. I have no special talents. In high school I learned to play the bassoon, badly. I never excelled at anything and was never singled out for anything at any time, except perhaps when the occasional ordinary girl would take an interest for a short period of time. And then, after high school, when I left home, as ordinary as ever, to attend an unremarkable college, there was no sweetheart who was sad to see me leave and no real friends, not even those half friends who say “God, Ryan, I’m gonna miss you,” the night before you leave while you sit beside them in their neon Datsun as they run a red light, narrowly missing a collision and you think to yourself what a fuckup this half friend is and you spend the night sharing a bottle of Jack smuggled from his father’s basement and when you get to school you never hear from him again even though you call once or twice. No, I never even had that friend. I spent the night before moving to college watching sitcoms with my parents until my father fell asleep and my mother got tired of disapproving of the television programming and went to bed herself. My parents were likely mildly disrupted by my absence but they went about their schedules and I am sure my absence made no more impact on their lives than my presence had.