That Sweet Scent

Living in the South is a privilege that so many Southerners take for granted and so many outsiders just can't understand. There stereotypes that still strongly prosper in the South, such as grand, deep green magnolias with their colorless blooms, wrapping front porches adorned with rocking chairs, and, as is typical in small towns, the old men and women lounging on the front porch or in their recliners gossiping like they are still in high school. But, aside from these stereotypes, which are so often more true than most Southerners like to admit, there are the quaint nuances of living in the South that really make it worth a person's while to plant their roots well below the Mason-Dixon Line. While the sky here isn't quite as big as that of Texas, it still has an allure that draws you in. The way at sunset you can see every shade of pink imaginable, with the clouds and treetops dappling the horizon. And the cicadas loudly murmuring outside. The smell of honeysuckle and wisteria growing wild in the summer. God's nature beckoning for the well-deserved reverence it desires.

But not only is it the outside that lures strangers in and keeps the natives in this land, it's the inside as well. Grandma's sweet tea is brewing on the stove and you know it's ready for chilling when you hear that all-too-familiar high pitch whistle. Grandpa and Daddy are grilling hamburgers and barbeque in the backyard for a Saturday get-together. All the cousins are running through the yard and the house waiting to be called for supper. All the Momma's are in the kitchen attempting to help Grandma with the cooking, as she sweetly but sternly tries to push them out, needing no help because she's a seasoned veteran.

This is where you can come home with all your problems and lay them at the feet of Momma and Jesus and you know that everything will work out for the best. This is where you can lay your head at night and feel safe and sound and accepted. This is where the sweet scent of home sweet home floats on the air, letting you breathe it in with every breath.

Meghan's Long Sentence

I enter the room, immediately look to the left, and there I see an intensely creepy clown standing in the corner and he begins to stalk towards me as I back out of the room and right before the clown reaches the threshold, the door slams shut and I start awake, safe in the confines of my bedroom.

Long Sentence - Socks

I was there to buy shoes – which I did – but as I was checking out, the cashier upsold me on a six pack of socks, and I agreed to buy them because they seemed like quality socks and, hey, I needed socks, but two years later, those are still the main socks of my rotation, which makes me wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t buy those socks, if I would just have a void in my sock stock, or if I would have ever gone out specifically to buy socks, or am I only capable of buying socks when it comes from the suggestion of someone else?

The Rachel Maddow Getaway Bag

Right now, there is a packed duffle bag in the closet by the front door of my apartment. In it, there are shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, shoes, and single serving toiletry items. There might be a bath towel, too, I can’t remember. That bag has remained unopened for over five years. I call it my “Rachel Maddow Getaway Bag.” I keep it packed just in case Rachel Maddow ever comes to where I live and asks me to drop everything and run away with her. Whenever she asks, I’ll go. Despite the food in the oven, the iron still on, or my internet history uncleared, I’ll just go. I’ll leave everything behind, and I’m always prepared to do so.

The odds of this ever happening aren’t good, but they also aren’t quite zero percent. I’d need a lot of ‘zeroes’ and a single ‘one’ to express the correct percentage, but it could never be just zero, so I’m prepared.

I bring that bag with me every time I move to a new place. When I dropped out of college for the first time to go play football and work on a farm in Serbia, I brought the bag. The next year, when I dropped out again to go play football and work on a farm – this time in Switzerland – the bag came with me, still unopened. I’ve quit jobs and moved away more times than I can remember, and that duffle bag always comes along, usually packed inside of a bigger bag.

I just can’t stand the thought of how I’d feel if Rachel ever came around and I didn’t have the bag. I imagine the nightmare scenario is where she knocks on my door and says, “Come with me right now. I have a helicopter waiting. Just trust me and come on.” And I say, “Hold on a second, let me go pack a bag.” I close the door a quarter of the way and sprint back to my closet. After I find a bag, stuff the cleanest of my clothes into it, and throw it over my shoulder, I come back to the door and Rachel is gone. When I step outside to look for her, I notice the whooshing sound of propellers slicing the air, and I look up to see Rachel at the helm of the ascending chopper, and she has a look in her eyes that says, “I’m sorry, Jonathan, but you blew it. This was your chance to get away, and you missed it, and now you’re stuck here.”

Conversation with a (alleged) Dominatrix

"So what else are you into."

"I'm a big movie buff, and I read a lot of superhero comics."

"Haha, oh jeez, superheroes."

"Not a fan?"

"Oh, no, they're fine, I just, um, deal with them a lot at work."

"Oh, wow, really?  Huh, I guess that makes sense.  Those costumes are all sexualized, and you read comics in your developing years or you never read them at all.  I never really thought about it, though."

"Never?"

"Well, I mean, not really.  I'm not immune to a convention girl in a skimpy costume, but superheroes are pretty far from sex in my brain.  I think superhero comics and cartoons are pretty deeply embedded in a part of my brain that just wants to be a kid still, and there's not really any place for sex there."

"So, you weren't into girls when you were a kid?"

"Oh, no, I definitely was.  Hell, when I was a kid, I did find superheroes sexy.  Do you remember... well, I guess you wouldn't remember.  I dunno if girls have a version of this or not, but when you're a boy, when you get to a certain age, you start getting erections.  And it's like a good year or two before you start masturbating, you just have these boners for some reason and it's so confusing and you worry that you're sick or something."

"Yeah, we do, it's called a period."

"Oh yeah.  Um, sorry.  Well, anyway, I have this memory.  When I was a kid, and I didn't want to go to sleep, I'd sneak into the bathroom and read Animorphs or play Pokemon on my Gameboy, and if Mom asked why I was up I'd say I had to go to the bathroom.  So, this one time, I don't know if it was my first erection or what, but I remember I had been looking at this picture in Wizard magazine for days, just looking at this picture of this girl in a bikini.  I remember the picture exactly, perfectly clear in my head, but I'm not going to show it to you because it's completely embarrassing.  I mean, it was the worst kind of over-sexualized yet not-actually-sexy comic book woman proportions, but I didn't know that back when I was eleven or twelve or however old I was.  Anyway, I go to the bathroom one night and sit on the toilet and flip to this page and look at the comic book bikini girl, and watch as my dick goes up, then flip to another page and wait for my dick to go down again.  I kept doing this over and over, experimentally, kind of amazed but wondering why my dick would do that, just all on it's own, like it was a completely separate entity from the rest of my body."

"It kind of is.  Dicks, in general, I mean, not just yours.  The tail leads the dog.  You know, vagina means 'sheathe,' like you sheathe your sword.  But 'penis' doesn't mean sword.  It means 'tail.'"

"I would have completely forgotten that story forever, but a couple years ago I was at Dragon*Con, and I entered this superhero costume contest."

"What were you dressed as?"

"Maidman.  He's like Batman, but with a theme of a french maid instead of a bat."

"And yet you pretend it's not a sex thing."

"Yeah, yeah.  So one of the judges for the contest was the guy who drew that bikini girl.  I wanted to walk up to him and say 'thank you so much, you helped me discover my sexuality," but, well, how do you say that to someone?"

"You never know, he might have been flattered.  Or maybe he hears that all the time.  Maybe he hates hearing it all the time and secretly wishes he could just draw flowers or something."

"Hm, maybe.  But Georgia O'Keefe drew flowers and everyone thought those were vaginas anyway.  Guess that's the thing about sex, you can't get away from it, no matter how much you much you wish you could just read about Batman beating up the Joker."

"Batman and Joker are just doing it because they're gay for each other, anyway."

"See?  Exactly what I mean."

Tony's Sentence

"So, we're on Skype, right, and he's playing some videogame or something and it's messing up his connection, so we turn off the video and that fixes it, but I can only hear him, and we're talking and I hear this sort of popping like something fell off one of his shelves or something, and he says "Well, that's not a good sound" and I ask him what it was and he's like "Five or six gunshots in rapid succession" and before I can even say anything I hear that sliding sound of his back door being opened and then immediately "OH JESUS CHRIST FUCK!" and I'm freaking out, I'm like "Tony, what the hell, are you okay?" and he's like "yeah, sorry" and starts laughing "I opened the door and a cicada flew into my face and then bounced off me, hit the wall and fell to the floor dead, the things fucking huge, and bugs just scare the shit out of me" and I would have been pissed at him for scaring me like that, except all I can think is how the hell is he scared of a cicada but will stick his head out of a window to see gunshots."

Post 1- the long sentence

About a year ago, I was in a screenwriting class where I was paired to do a short film with a friend, Gina, who had invited another friend to come and help with our movie, even though the script called for one actor, so we added a snippet where she played a FBI agent that was coming up my driveway (I’m not sure how that clip fit in with a film about coming up with an idea for a script [an overplayed plot, but it was our first movie]), and to get her into character, we gave her a backstory and lots of details that weren’t in the movie and were irrelevant to the plot, as far as I remember, but that seemed to help her, and after a few takes of her slouching up the driveway like she was delivering bad news, we knew she wouldn’t come across as an agent, but the project was not being graded on casting or acting abilities, so we needed something, a small action, that is overused by actors playing agents on television which would make her identifiable, even if it was as a stock character, so Gina told her to pretend to talk into a hidden microphone in her shirt sleeve, even going as far as to show her by performing the action herself, but the friend (whose name I can’t even pretend to remember) must have misunderstood, so the final take that we were forced to choose had the friend walking up the driveway mumbling into her bare wrist, looking like a lunatic.