This might seem like a long, rambling kind of entry, but there's a point to it. Fair warning. When I get to the part about smoking dope, you'll probably think I got wasted before writing this.
I was, as the British would say, "mucking about" in some of the folders on my memory box (computer) the other day, and found something interesting.
I should give you the background on my memory boxes. I prefer PCs, because my fingers are large and don't work very well, and when I try to type on a laptop it looks like this: Ihgq[ig lotgw of wong =kleys.
A full size keyboard cuts down on the gobbledy gook.
So every once in a while, the PC either dies, or (more usually) the benevolent overlord Microsoft comes up with a new operating system.
This means I get a new PC, and that means I have to to copy 200+ books and stories, and the 250+ ideas in my project folder, and all my half finished projects onto a flash drive and move them onto my new hard drive.
Then I store the old computer (if it still works) because that's my ultimate backup. I still have my original PC, which booted with a floppy disk that has DOS 3 on it, I think.
Anyway, the easiest way to do all this copying and pasting is to copy whole directories (folders, to you wet behind the ears types) at once. Then I dump them into a directory I call "Old machine", from which I can pull things out to establish new working folders. This lets me clean house, so to speak. There's lots of stuff I started, but which died a deserved death. I won't throw it away completely, but I can relegate it to "old machine" status.
Now, if you ever smoked weed, you might be familiar with the term "second generation joint". I only know about this because my friends smoked weed in college. I experimented with it, but like Bill Clinton, never inhaled.
What I have, though, are second (and third and fourth and fifth) generation folders in the cobwebby "old machine" folder on my computer. I mean there are files in there that have dates in the 1999 time frame. They survived Y2K.
And once in a blue moon, there will be a pearl lying within the mud. It may be a stinker in and of itself, or as written, but the idea is a great one. And something I wasn't skilled enough to write in 2001 might be within my talents, now.
What I found, the other day, was a story I think I originally wrote to enter into a Valentines Day contest of some sort. I think that's what it was, because it was in a folder called "contests and unpublished".
But I don't think I ever entered it into a contest. That's probably because it's 6 chapters long, and most contests won't accept anything that long. But it couldn't be any shorter without gutting it. Imagine Beauty and the Beast with just Beauty in it.
So I rewrote it and, since there is no contest to enter it into, I'm just going to post it this year as my Valentine to all my readers.
It's what I'd call a reflective story, looking back on what might have been your life, if you were a boy raised in say, the fifties, sixties or seventies. If you're younger than that, then it might have been your father's story. There's more innocence in it than there would be in today's youth.
I often get mail from people who tell me a story of mine dredged up a (happy) memory from their youth. The memory I hope this one dredges up is pinning a corsage on a girl's dress, and in the process sliding your fingers between her dress and breast in the process - right in front of her parents.
That part of this story is definitely autobiographical.
So, two chapters a day should get the whole thing up before the big day.
Happy Valentine's Day to everybody.
Bob