i see some here are calling for the return of writer's prompt. i'm all for it, but perhaps we should do it bimonthly instead of weekly.

write about friendship; losing friends, gaining friends, loving friends, coming to appreciate friends, etc.

I agree on bimonthly, i'm looking forward to this and contribute something soon.

i agree on spacing it out. weekly is a bit much. but jumping to bimonthly seems extreme. maybe monthly?

i'll do whatever you guys want.... im excited that we're talking about having it at all

by bimonthly, i meant twice a month. if we want to do it monthly, that's fine too.

that would be biweekly basically

grr.

monthly it is, friends.

im fine either way. but for the record, in my previous post i was saying monthly would be better than bimonthly. biWEEKly is fine with me. again, whatever you guys want.

i have some ideas for this one, by the way. hopefully over the weekend ill get some time to sit down and put them on paper. i suppose we just post them in this thread?

I'm not sure if this has to be autobiographical or what, but I'm going to give this a go. I'll try and crank something out soon.

Alright, this is a little off-center, but there's some things here. Hopefully you folks pick up on some of it. I shortened it in some places because I didn't want it to be too long.

The heat radiated up from the ground, a pulsing blackness from the asphalt, concrete and reinforced steel. The day was clear, finally. A week of rain yielded hues of punishing blues, sharp whites and greens tunneling up from the ground. All wasted on this day, of all days, he thought. He walked briskly through the urban crawl, clatter, cracked glass. Rivulets of sweat trickled from a bushy tousle of hair, winding their way down a 28-year old face that, for the moment, looked decades older. Sounds of humanity sprang up everywhere – car brakes, screeching friction, honked horns, raised voices. Scenes from a memory, scenes from today. Los Angeles in bloom was a frightening thing to behold, and then the thoughts came. He’d staved them off until now with the boring humdrum, monotone voices, the ones that sell steak knives and analyze foreign policy decisions and decide when to turn off the oven when the chicken is ready. All cross-magnetic waves, distractions, things that mattered only when nothing else did. No, you’d have to face this eventually, he thought. No point in holding your hand up to the flood any longer.

At once came the memories as he crossed the 12th street bridge, coming between two bank buildings and a homeless man with a cart asking for change. Each foot pounding one in front of the other, nothing in focus but the cracked squares in front. Mom’s smile came first, a mild surprise considering he didn’t exactly remember the way it looked. He screwed his eyes into the sun but the spots on the back of his eyelids, burning bright, didn’t elicit any better response.
In years to come he wouldn’t remember much from the funeral that day. Only faces, concerned faces, those of people who had avoided tragedy or burrowed it deep. He knew this somehow. He never knew why.

After the service a friend named Grayson offered to take him out for lunch, talk things out. If he’d had any designs of talking, which he didn’t, he needn’t have worried. Grayson went by his last name. They’d been friends in high school, but he couldn’t much tell why Grayson had shown up. He accepted the offer simply because he was the first to ask. The two men, both in undone black suits, cut dutifully through the metropolis, Grayson doing his part to talk away the afternoon. Baseball, women, none of it stopped.

“I know this great place, this club up around the corner, real serious place to get some thinking done, you know? The women are real nice.” Grayson said.

They rounded the corner to a strip club, hidden behind an alleyway in a destitute part of town.

The men sat in a corner booth, but the noise was loud. They had to shout to talk. Grayson paused occasionally to swill from his cast-iron flagon of beer and then launched back into virulent conversation.

“This whole thing, these connections we make, they’re completely arbitrary.” Strobe lights, neon and black light dominated his field of vision, mixing incongruously with everything Grayson said. There was a strange equilibrium about this place that seemed to center everything off-kilter about the last six months. It was all so ridiculous and yet sane.

“You know the people you know because you met them through other people you know, and you don’t really know any of them.” Grayson paused here to shout pleadingly at Candi, a 24-year old Elton John fan from Canada working her way through grad school on Grayson’s pocket change. His smile faded before he turned back, shouting once again. “Take this example. You’re walking down the street one day and you see Candi, right? Maybe not Candi, but maybe this is a woman you’re really jonesing for. Nine times out of ten you don’t talk to her. Right? Am I right?”

Grayson wouldn’t continue until he consented to this point. He shrugged a token shoulder while Grayson got up to throw a 20 on stage.

“Yes, you know I’m right because it’s happened. It happens every day. Why don’t you? Because it’s against the grain, against what you’re taught. We depend on these connections we make with other people to guide us through these situations, stuff like this shit you’re going through now. We’ve been taught since we were young, subconsciously of course, not to circumvent the whole thing. By going and talking to that girl, the one of your dreams sitting in some fucking breakfast nook with her cute laced panties and her intelligent reading and her black-rimmed glasses – you’re denying all the other connections you’ve made that took you years to build. You're shorting the circuit. Because you could have magic with this one woman in minutes and you can’t do it. You can’t fucking do it because it undoes everything you’ve ever done, and you’re scared shitless, man. You’re scared. We’re all scared and we don't know why.”

He parted ways with Grayson, who apparently knew the DJ or somebody inside, he couldn’t hear which. He walked home slowly, hands stuffed in his pockets, a broad smile, the sprawl everywhere, the cracked concrete, the homeless man with the shopping cart, the sun radiating back from whence it came.

He walked into a bar, it wasn't dimly lit, disreputable or detestable. He thought about ordering a beer, but decided he had to take a shit first, so he told his friends that he had to go take a shit. Somebody has pissed on the toilet seat and he sat in it, somebody had also drew a picture of Hitler with a big cock on the wall.

Well, he went to wipe his ass, and as soon as he touched the toilet paper, somebody had pissed on that too.

Back in the bar, he saw that his friends left him. He played a song by Duran Duran on the jukebox and kneed some fat ass woman in the gut.

Glad this one really took off

it was a dark and stormy night