Novel no more, but full of nog

It pains me as I write this, but last Sunday I gave up the novel. This makes it two years in a row that I wasn’t able to bring home the bacon. Two years of failure. Two years of half finished pieces of crap taking up space on my hard drive, never to be completed, much less looked at ever again.

And I have to say, I don’t think I’ll miss it. In fact, when I made the decision to put down the unending tome that I’d grown to loath, full of stilted characters, awkward interactions, and descriptions so boring I couldn’t even read them again to revise them, I wrote a 10 page short story to pass the afternoon. And I liked it.

And that’s really all that matters: Do I like what I’m doing? Am I having fun? That’s the point of a contest. Is it fun. Last year the novel was fun; I got to write about lumberjacks, interstellar lumberjacks! This year was a little more serious; serious by design. And I figured out that I don’t do serious that well (and by ‘not well’ I mean ‘at all’). Of course, I knew that already, but I had to prove it to myself all over again. I wanted to branch out into other forms of fiction, but absurdity runs in my blood, and leaving it out just makes a dry, stale tale that ends up going nowhere.

Even as I was approaching page 50 in the novel, I was dreaming of other stories that I could tell. A young man’s nightmarish journey into the desert of Bahrain, his mind twisted by the horrific sights he sees along the way, culminating in his arrival at Michael Jackson’s estate. The horror, the horror. Or a scathing expose on the terrible price some pay so we can have cheap, abundant cheesecake, as I go under cover and investigate the cheesecake sweatshop. But in the end I wrote a story about a small town cop who foiled a crime made possible by a time machine built out of bowling alley machinery.

So you can see, yes, absurd.

In other news, I played in the Turkey Bowl over the long weekend. The Turkey Bowl is a game organized by Paul Hacker, father of my good friend Aaron. Every year, the Hacker family (Paul, Aaron, Tracy, Tracy’s boyfriend, Ryan, Ryan’s husband, and other honorary Hackers) take on the best of the rest of their friends in a titanic struggle that can only be described as a Match for the Ages. This year, the Hacker Smackers won the day, beating the Hackers by a score of 105-98. Yes, a high scoring game. You’d think we were playing basketball…

This game saw several advancements over last year. First, last year most of the people playing left after halftime. Innovation: This year they removed halftime. Second, those who did stay the second half left right after the game. Innovation: Chocolate fountain. That’s right, they got a chocolate friggin’ fountain. And we discovered that no matter what it is, as long as it’s dipped in chocolate, it tastes damn good.

However, the icing on the cake of this evening came almost twelve hours after the game ended when I finally arrived home, bruised and battered from the day’s activity. My parents have a hot tub (something I always forget about), and I decided that my stupendous play had earned me a relaxing late night dip in its healing waters. That and anyone will tell you, the best time to go in a hot tub is in the winter time, trust me. I went inside, put on a pair of bathing trunks and scampered outside in the sub-freezing weather to unlatch the big foam cover. I didn’t waste any time turning on the lights, as I wanted to be able to look up at the stars while I was enjoying the jets. I flipped open the cover and stepped inside.

Into an inch of frigid, slimy water that was all that was left of the water inside the “hot” tub. I recoiled in shock and hightailed it back inside, running the shower for as long as it took to erase that terrible water from my memory. Upon further investigation I learned that it had been drained when my parents left for New Zealand back in March and they never refilled it.

Needless to say, I spent all Saturday afternoon getting the damn thing ready for my next visit in December. I shall not be fooled again.