Gravy and Growing Pains
A Creative Writing Exercise For the Ridiculously Out of Shape Writer.
I want to be a real writer. A REAL writer. What does that even mean? I assemble and publish posts every day on our country music blogs, and occasionally I'll pull together a heavily-researched and well thought out editorial for the same audience. I'm proud of my work, but that's my day job. I want to write about my life, not just the lives of celebrities. I want to share my 45 and growing years of experience on this planet, the good times and the bad. I want to use a typewriter to explore a thought I might have had 20 years ago through the lens of the experience I have today. I want to make some kind of sense, find some kind of through-line in the stories I tell and the repeating mental hurdles I constantly have to overcome again and again when the lessons don't stick the first time. Will anyone read these things? Probably not... should I write them anyway? I guess everybody needs a hobby.
I'm currently eating a pile of mashed potatoes covered in brown gravy and Salisbury style meatballs. It tastes like something I had at JB's in Phoenix when I was 16 and it's comforting. Nothing else about that job was. I quit in the middle of my first solo shift after witnessing my tips being swiped by another server and sliding into broken glass from a dropped Tobasco bottle. Literal hell. But the food there was good.
That restaurant has been closed for almost 25 years now but it still stands out as one of the strongest memories of my teenage years. I used to go there with ____ and his family when we were still just kids dating each other against our parents' loudest objections. It was a treat, since my family never had money for restaurants. The strawberry pie was a revelation back then. Now I can make it much better than they did. The restaurant, the job, the pie, the relationship... they all went away over time and I upgraded to better versions of the parts I enjoyed. I still make the brown gravy and I think about the job. It was the only real food service job I ever had and it taught me I was never going to make it in that business. The rest is pretty unimportant in my day to day life.
I've been published before by a real publishing house. It was for a poetry collection and mine was chosen out of thousands to be included. I was in Junior high at the time. I was extremely proud but nobody else seemed to care. I got a certificate but never got a copy of the book. The certificate got lost in one of our many moves, and I'll be damned if I even remember what the poem was about. It lit a fire though that I found a LOT of joy in the writing and even more in the validation that I might be good at it.
Of course now that I'm older I realize that "good" is subjective and the contest that got me published was probably a fundraiser to guilt the parents into buying books, but what does any of that matter? I'm sure tons of kids who wrote for those competitions never picked up a creative pen again. I did. You never know what might ignite your personal interests I guess. Maybe another published poet from the same book got a copy and decided book-binding or cover design was in their future. Maybe their parents were so proud they bought a dozen copies and gave them all to family as a humble-brag holiday gift. Mine didn't. I guess that still bothers me which is crazy because in the big picture of offenses my parents committed over time, and there were many, they probably don't even remember this one. What's the point?
The point I guess, is that writing, reading, using words as weapons and salve, has always been a part of my life and an activity that brought me joy independent of whatever else was going on in the world, and I want to get back to it. So I will. But first, I'm going to finish my lunch.
Watching: “The Vampire Diaries‘ (Because we all need a familiar background show now and then).
Drinking: 2oz Evan Williams BiB over 8oz icewater. Simple.
Listening to: “Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves
This is my first submission to SubStack. If you would like to read my previous works, visit www.whiskeychick.rocks/blog . Cheers!