Stubs - Vernon

No – I don’t waste all of my time.

I’m sometimes asked why I have so few books and stories. (I guess blog posts don’t count.) After all, I’m told, it doesn’t really take that long to write a novella, what do you do with the rest of your time?

You mean other than borrow Pop Tarts from friends?

Okay, I’m not a complete bum. I do a lot of writing nobody ever sees. For each Trouble in Taos, or Mortified, there are dozens of story ideas I squirrel away for possible future use. I write a page or two so I can remember the idea, then save it in two burgeoning folders on my laptop. I call these writings, Stubs. 

 Here’s one I wrote on Tuesday.

Vernon Hororfield Crawford considered himself nobody’s fool. This was true to a degree. There was no registered deed, no contract of bondage, no mafia blood-oath that marked Vernon as belonging to anybody in particular.

It was certainly true relationally, as Vernon had never had a girl-friend, unless you count Mary-Ellen Boxenbaucher who had once let him kiss her – right on the braces, during recess in third grade.

As such, it might be best stated that Vernon was a everybody’s fool, a free-agent fool, a fool at large, a fool about town, a fool without boarders, a…

I think you get the idea.

If you saw Vernon at home, you probably wouldn’t need this narrative to come the above fool-related conclusion. Vernon lived in a large trailer park, which other than being unusually tornado-magnetic, was remarkable in only one respect – its paucity of rubbish disposal facilities.

The reason for the paucity (or lack, if you don’t enjoy the word paucity – or have developed an allergy to words that begin with the letters p, a, u, c, which includes… paucity among possible others I can’t think of at the moment,) was that Theobald (Grimy) James, the manager of the Gone With the Wind Trailer Park rented the community’s industrial-sized 23 foot dumpster to Vernon as a mobile home.

Other than the lack of windows, paucity (there’s that word again,) of electricity (Grimy had strung one extension cord from Blind Man Bridger’s breaker box,) and general smell of ancient putrefaction, the mini-delux (as Grimy called it,) served Vernon’s needs tolerably well.

Of course he had to be careful to keep his high-threshold doors well padlocked, not only to keep his neighbors from throwing trash onto his kitchen table, but to keep scavengers from claiming the TV, mini-fridge, and electric toilet he rented from Bloodsucker’s Bay Fine Furniture to Let.

On the plus side, having entirely metal walls, he had the best broadcast channel reception in the park.

That’s it – that’s all there is. Someday, Vernon and his foolishness might become a short story or even a book, but for now, he joins a host of other stubs in my voluminous “Pick Up” file.

But unlike his file co-residents and the electric toilet in his dumpster, Vernon, having been posted here, has seen the light of day.

So you see - I don't waste time.  There's no reason in the world that I have a link to this video.