I’ve finished revisions on the taxidermy book, coming in at 87,226 words in 283 pages, plus end notes. So now what? Well, to fill the writing time in the mornings until another longer project came up, I’d planned to write missed-connections ads and post them to Craigslist. These would be mini essays, nonfiction in every way, based on real people I’d encounter in my day as a new southerner negotiating a new landscape.
I’d figured such a thing had probably been done before: lyric missed connections, it’s such an obvious romantic form. But who would have thought such a thing would be going on in Tuscaloosa?
We’ve got a top-ten MFA program here, so I should have thought. And I would have taken tacks different from this writer:
In your first life, you were foolish–running where you shouldn’t be running, crashing into trees, touching everything you saw. In your next life, you were more cautious–ducking when things were thrown your way, jumping over crevasses. In the lives after that you began to understand the world that you were placed in: that things, terrible things, can come at you from behind, from underneath. To be swept off one’s feet only to fall again from the sky, curled up in a ball, rotating. When I saw you, surrounded, you were aware of the names of things–you knew that when you jumped you could move back and forth in mid-air like a balloon, like wings, like spiraling.
Like, I would have tried to be more concrete and honest. But now? I’ll try nothing. The excitement of the project is all gone.
Or maybe not. Maybe I can help turn the otherwise negligible tuscaloosa.craigslist.org into a literary thunderdome. Game on, wistful connection-misser! We’ll see whose inbox fills more quickly with desperation.
That section you quoted, the section you found perhaps lacking in honesty and concreteness? I don’t think it could be any more honest or concrete. It is the experience of playing a video game. The title of that particular Missed Connection is the Konami Code (infamous for granting you 30 extra lives in Contra).
Barry! I’m an old, old fan of the Konami Code.
It’s a great term: “I live by the Konami Code.”
By the Black Warrior, good ideas don’t wait. And sincerity gets its due in forms previously unimagined. The lyric rebounds against the lyre; the concrete mixes with the mist. Then someone screams ROLL TIDE in your face.
It made me fatter, but a better writer.