Wednesday, October 22, 2008

(W9) The Snot Squad

We had arrived an hour early for my bus back home; Jake, Tia and myself, the only members of the Snot Squad.

The Squads formation took place on my last day as a resident in Portland, I was walking with Tia to locate a brick that said 'WHAT', I wanted a picture of it before I left. On my search we ran into Jake. I gave up the search, when I found a spot where a brick once was and I convinced them both to go to get bubble tea. On the walk down I took a picture of Tia as she scrunched up her face. We sat down with our choices of bubble tea, each tasted like a different flower and the blue, pearl sized, 'bubbles' would hit the roof of your mouth as they came out of the straw. I went to take a picture of Jake and he scrunched his face. I looked back on the camera and sure enough it was the same scrunched up face Tia had made. I had my photo taken and we were hence forth the Snot Squad.

I had bought a SD card for this trip to Portland, it still had six hundred or so shots I could take. So, the second I got in I started taking pictures. We started laughing and joking about the Snot Squad and I decided that we needed a group photo. I turned to one of the people sitting on the bench and asked if he would take our picture. He got the camera ready and I said 'We are going to make weird faces, so don't worry we're supposed to look like that' We all scrunched up our faces, the man looked over the top of the camera to make sure the viewfinder was not playing a trick on him. It was all I could do not to laugh.

When it was time to form the line we sat down and started talking about random things we had done and friends that we had. When the topics started to run out, Tia said, 'have you ever played the pulse game?' We each took one of the others hands, the pulse was sent by squeezing the hand that had not just been squeezed. Tia squeezes Jake's hand, then he squeezes mine, then I squeeze Tia's. It continues until someone loses it, ours got to the point were it seemed that the pulse you had just sent was being received by your other hand.

The hour went by too quickly. After a man took a head count we traded hugs, they left the station and I got on the bus to go home.

5 comments:

johngoldfine said...

With you, nka, it's never predictable--will it be too dry, too obscure, too elusive, too cut 'n' dried? Or just right?

This plays right on the risky edge of being a tad too elusive, too obscure, but...love conquers all-- or at least in this case, affection does--and I think you have a piece here that does the job with week 9. Are you satisfied with it?

nkassigned08 said...

I like it, there are a few spelling mistakes I missed when I read it over.

The second grif I wish I could soften up, but it only plays as a background. The first part of that grif was meant to show that this was the first time they had met, but it is a little foggy.

Most of my work on here seems like a piece of a whole. Like if you took three frames out of a movie real and set them off on their own.

The first and last grif are always summations to make the story stand as its own. If I wrote out my life then the Snot Squad would be a familiar entity by the time you got to this point.

Is there a way to set smaller parts of a whole to the side?

johngoldfine said...

Set them to the side? Not sure what you mean.

nkassigned08 said...

my life would be the entire story, this would be one piece of that story. how do yo make one piece of a whole its own complete story?

johngoldfine said...

Not easy. One way of telling a story is with short shots, stacking up bits and pieces until they resolve into a coherent whole. Each of those bits can be a free standing item. The writer in the end has to be sure that the freestanding pieces do come together and cohere--that's what rewrites are all about. In the meantime, I guess my advice is to forget about the big picture temporarily and act as if each piece were itself alone the whole story.