Reaction to Fiction Pack #1

After reading all of the fiction stories in the packet, my favorite would have to be "Misdemeanors."  This is the perfect example of everyday life.  We all take embarrassing stories and try to make them "better" in order to make them less embarrassing.  The Old Man clearly didn't enjoy that he was arrested for such a petty crime so instead tries to brag about that face that he did time in prison.

I found "The Letter from Home" to be my most disliked.  While I've come to the conclusion that the narrator does in fact die at the end of the story, and the entire story was the last few days flashing before their eyes, I do feel like the real purpose of the story was for the author to show off that she can write a three page sentence free of grammatical errors.  To me, that just comes across as a bit egotistical.

I did enjoy "Walking the Baby to the Liquor Store."  After two readings, I thought it was just a cute story about a father doing what he can to keep his baby entertained.  It wasn't until the third reading in class that the father may be an alcoholic.  It was the third paragraph that really got me thinking along this line.  "How much work could one possibly do in that brief half hour?  And measured against such joy, such pure infant bliss (which may well indeed anticipate a lifetime's happiness), how important is it that I go to work at all?  I thought at first he was referring to the child's infant bliss, but instead, perhaps he is referring to his own bliss at drinking.  This paragraph also ends with him saying that he will sometimes share a drink as soon as they get home, right there in the kitchen.

20 Words Poems

"Falling"

Flashback to the palisades

The tightrope sways endlessly in darkness

Concealed is the imminent

Below me lies the carbonaceous fissures

Drowning in shattered courses

I am insufficient in the unrequited reticenc

livid, I scale to the top

And reach the interstice

"Her and I"

Fissures course through her heart

Shattered, she sways before me like a tightrope

Drowning in the endless flashbacks

I am insufficient to push back the darkness

Concealed in my palisades, I must scale my own mountains

A place of unrequited reticence is imminent

I am carbonaceous, she is livid

We arrive at a crossties

"Flashbacks"

Endlessly, we drown in flashbacks

Darkness courses in our shattered memories

They are insufficient to provide us reason

And yet we walk their tightrope daily

Scaling the fissures, I am livid to enter the palisades

Concealed is the imminent crossties of my life

Swaying into unrequited interstice

I am carbonaceous

I searched for the interstices reticence

Zakk... Or Is It Zach? Or Zak?

I've gone by many names and spelling variations throughout my life.  So many so that girlfriends past have also been unsure of what to call me.  I even have gone by Kyle amongst a special group of friends of mine.  Stories have emerged for amongst each of them, and they are all at least partially true, to an extent.

But here it is.

The true story.

Or as true as I believe it to be today.
"Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" - The Joker (Batman: The Killing Joke, 1988)

The year was 2003.  I was thirteen and had just begun a soon-to-be dismal middle school career.  I had a few friends, not a ton, but I certainly wasn't lacking any.  Feeling a need to rebel from my over authoritative parents, and never having really loved the name I was born with, I wanted to change my name.  I decided to change it from Zach to Zak, because I thought it was unique and personally, cool as Hell.

At the end of the school year our entire seventh grade class (200ish?) took a trip for the weekend to Chicago.  While in Chicago and on Navy Pier, I bought myself an Orange Navy Pier hat (I promise this ties in later) that I wore every day.  People knew me by that hat.  I'd be riding my bike through my hometown and people would come up to me days later and tell me they saw me, and they knew it was me because of my orange hat.  My own parents loved it (still hated the name) because they could find me if we were at a family reunion at a park or something to that effect.

Flash-forward a year.  Now I'm in eighth grade and really getting into the punk rock and metal scene.  I had picked up the bass guitar and was about to play a Metallica cover medley with my band at that years school talent show.  And as expected, my role models were covered in tattoos, one of which was Ozzy Osbourne.  One of my favorite tattoos of his was simplistic enough, "OZZY" written across.  I looked down at my hands and said "Damn, my name only has three letters in it."  So I thought, "What the Hell, I'll just add another 'K' at the end."

And so I did.

Flash-forward again a year or two (or three, I can't always remember!) and I was visiting Chicago with my family.  We return to Navy Pier, and I sneak off and return to the hat shop were years previous I obtained my legendary orange hat.  I find out now that they make custom hats and I decide to have one made.  My new hat was the same bright orange but with big black lettering reading "ZAKK" across it.

It was official.

Mom was pissed.  Dad was apathetic.  Sister thought it was awesome.

The hat became more legendary than the first.  For the first time ever, everyone knew who I was (and not just because the hat had my name across it).  It was a great conversation piece and ice breaker. 

I wore that hat for years, finally retiring it in 2008 after my new dog chewed it and destroyed the brim.  But since then the name has stuck.  I even have two different resumes, depending on which I think they will like better.