I found a short story I wrote, longhand, when I was fifteen years old.

Rex woke me this morning.  One moment I was asleep, dreaming that a crate of oranges had just been delivered to my door, and the next moment I was awakened by friendly snorts and whines coming from the speaker on my bedside table.

Rex is my dog.  Actually, Rex is a kind of hybrid of a computer dog and a Rolodex.  I programmed Rex in 72 hours straight.  About thirty hours of it was the actual skeleton of the program, and the rest getting Rex’s snorts and whines right.  I did it, finally.  It took me 42 hours, but I console myself with the fact that it was the 42 hours at the end of the programming rather than the beginning, and that about three hours into the snorting lessons my coffee machine broke down.

I got out of bed, cautiously, and tiptoed across the collection of coffee mugs that had accumulated on the carpet of my bedroom, to the bathroom first, then to the hall closet (this was a mistake; I am not a morning person), then to the kitchen.

I walked up to the counter and opened my high-use drawer.  It contains my keyboard, my pizza roller, my coffee filters, a box of pens, and my laser pistol.

I buy my pens from my baker.  He sells donuts by the “baker’s dozen” (13) and pens by the “baker’s gross”.  I get 156 pens in a box.  This is my baker’s logic.

He maintains that because a gross is a dozen dozen, a baker’s gross should be a dozen baker’s dozen.  I say that a baker’s gross should be 169 pens: a baker’s dozen baker’s dozen.  I still buy my pens from him, though.  My baker’s pens are cheaper than their office-supply counterpart, and I am in the habit of finding myself needing a loaf of cornmeal hearth bread more frequently than finding myself in need of a telephone answering machine.  After all, people stopped using telephones a hundred years ago.

My laser pistol qualifies as a high-use item due to the large number of people I have over for a cup of coffee and the corresponding number of people who have never seen a Smith & Wesson Mark VII Aility [sic] sidearm.  I traded my car for it at last month’s community swap meet.  It doesn’t work.  Neither did my car.

I removed my last pen from the drawer.  This was OK: I could use some more cornbread.  Four loaves.  I’ve gotten this down to a fine science: I go through 156 pens for every four loaves of cornbread for every 3 coffee mugs.

I was also out of coffee filters.  This was not OK.

So, car-less, coffee-less, wearing clothes I had slept in, and carrying my last pen, I made a plan:

• Buy coffee filters
• Buy pens
• Buy bread
• Buy car
• Wash clothes

Armed with this list, I set out to face the day, stepping over the crate of oranges outside my door.

So wordy!  But I don’t think too horrible for a 15-year-old.

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:21:02 +0000
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