Chapter Two.
Two years ago, I wrote the first chapter of what was going to be my first book. I wrote it on the bus ride home from Beautiful Downtown Minneapolis to the Beautiful Suburb of Apple Valley. It took all of forty five minutes to write. Upon posting it as the beginnings of a serialized chapter book on the old blog, it was promptly forgotten about.
Things got in the way.
Life got in the way.
It’s interesting, as I was re-reading that first chapter today, how mysterious I sounded, with the last sentence of the chapter saying:
“You see, he only has three weeks left to live.”
How’s that for mysterious??
Today, the old man is riding on the same bus as two years ago.
However, the freeway’s been under massive deconstruction for the last few months.
So, we’re taking “The Scenic Route”.
Through the older neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Lots of older architecture homes here. Lots of older, thread bare houses, houses not painted in dozens of years. Front and back yards not kept up any longer. Front porches with dirty old couches sitting in the open air.
We finally made it to the freeway, passing this huge hill of crumpled concrete that was torn up from the old freeway. They have now moved some sort of machinery to crush this broken concrete slabs into a much finer hill of stones. I’m assuming this will be used as a base layer before laying in the new cement.
Turning onto the crosstown, the sun starts shining, and, after several days of gloom and doom with the rain, the sky is now a nice blue, with some white clouds.
I’d written “Winter is coming” earlier this week, since on Monday morning, it was so dark out, so gloomy, a person actually thought Winter was a day aways.
This morning, I wrote “Winter is coming”, not due to the darkness n the morning, but, due to it being colder than a witch’s . It was only fifty degrees this morning.
The old man looks out the bus window and sees the sun finally. He smiles.
He’s not smiled in the last few days.
Oh, that’s a lie.
He ran into his most favorite person in the lobby at Thrivent on Tuesday, and they brought a big smile to his face. It’s interesting, for some reason this person still gets their hair done in my building, even though they’ve never worked for Thrivent, and they live in the suburbs even farther away than the old man does.
Passing “The old black dog” road, you know, the one that leads to the power plant, the old man looks out the bus window, looking for that stupid black dog. He’s never been able to see him (or her, I guess).
Somehow, based on what the old man has written in this post, it’s not hitting the same pistons as chapter one did.
There’s no explosive force behind the words.
Has he lost his touch, he asks himself??
I think I remember the ride home while writing chapter one, and it was a gloomy day, maybe we can only write on gloomy days, I don’t know.
Sarah, the old man’s colleague in WI, was quite chatty today via that stupid messenger mechanism. The old man knows they would get a kick out of knowing they were mentioned in the book the old man is writing. She’s about half the old man’s age, married with two young kids, 4 and 7, he believes.
We’re about three minutes away from the transit station so the old man’s going to have to wrap up chapter two.
Yes, we know chapter two stinks when compared with chapter one.
We’re working on it, geez, show some patience!
More later.
