Non-fiction / giants
Imagine you're a 7'4" sufferer of giganticism. You wear drapes for clothes, had to take the front seat out of the volvo to reach the gas pedals, and are in constant vigilance lest some door jamb or umbrella spine brain or blind you, respectively. Now imagine, because of this disease, you are good at basketball. really good. you have just the right ammount of giganticism. Your arms are tree trunks, your legs are bigger tree trunks, your jawline's length is just short of your closest heighted opponets femur. You get your way paid through college. You make a semi-pro team in idaho with a badger for a logo and a hairlip for a head cheerleader. Things are smooth. Your apartment, for which you have to bend over double to do anything, is comfortably furnished in matching couches with adjacent armrests sawed off so that you can lay prone while watching reality tv before you go to bed at 10pm so that you can be at practice early the next day. Then the arthritis sets in. YOu move slower and slower, so that every day the advantages that your height has bestowed upon your skill is itself the burden limiting your effectiveness on the court. Smaller players sky over your flattfooted attempts at defense. No matter how lowyou bend at the knees, your center of gravity is so high that even the point guards can get rebounding positioning. Give me the right lever and i can move the world. You go into debt when the team cancles your contract, effectively cutting off the medical benefits. The bills pile up. The specialists start referring you to generalists to homeopaths to free clinics where even the blind sense your oafiness and click their clack sticks to the other side of the room, for the fear of falling trees.
Now, if you can imagine all that, you get glimpse of manic depressivenes. All my best work occurs under one polar state or the other. Deadlines looming, sprinkled with a little sleep deprivation/self medicating, and bam, 30 pages on the rhetorical aspects of satire Poe utilizes when writing "how to write a blackwood article." The depression sinks in, and its a different form of productivity. Sensations burst to the surface. Fiction bubbles. Liquid medications turn to methods involving flame and blown glass. Now your published. The delusions of the lows mix with the bareskinned verisimilutude of the lows, and people are comparing you to this author, who happens to have a similar mental deficency, but on the more managable side. He writes novels in months. You take the same time to bang out half of a really good short story. When your not sucking flame through the business end of a pipe you named "Manute." So, the very thing that gave you your education, your livelihood, your joie de vive, is the thing sucking out your insides and leaving you prostrate and alone while people of inferior net intellelects are making buisness mergers and condom sales viable. you lapse into self doubt. Nothing you do matters so you do nothing. You cancle your netflix membership because, if theres a movie you haven't seen, its a bad one. You read, but then run across someone just as depressing as you are so you wallow and write a few pages in their voice and go to bed with the glass of box of wine half drink and further fermentaing on your plastic Target nightstand. I write, but then run away from what i've written. I go on a date that goes so well that i'm at her house, on her couch, and she's angled towards me, cleavage thrust, and i make the decision for in-action, taking my leave and the solace that i cut all ties before the knots were even firmly set. What does the giant do, trained in a manner for which he is no longer capable of, with the bills and the inanity of the world piling under his size 22 rebocks? He takes a shotgun, a gift from the mayor after the Idaho Badgers beat the Idaho Woverines, with the help of his 20 rebounds and 13 points, and puts it to his head a fires. The ambulance leaves the back door slightly open because no one reacted to the gunshot, and rigermortis has left him so stiff that unless they break his legs the EMT's will never get his whole trunk into the truck.
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First I will say it needs to be run through a spelling and grammar check!!! I will not waste credits pointing out EVERY mistake. Second it is one big paragraph, which makes it very hard to read.
wow extremely morbid. Understandable though, frustrating, it seems like all you can do when life backstabs you is blow your head off. I get it. This is raw and emotional. Add some more details about the emotion and this would be a great piece.
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Wow! This is a marvelous piece. The cycle is amazing. How else could a story be written about the plight of the unseen, the unspoken. Great job with kudos for courage and honesty.
First, I love the use of Archimedes, and the “joie de vive” thrown in gives it a sense of momemtum at that point. There are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors, but I think you know this. I feel this could be a better story if it were longer. I remember watching a documentary as a child where a woman with gigantism removed the the front seat of her car to drive, so I was wondering if you ever saw that? Overall….Truly..it defines the downfall of someone with potential, and with no fault of their own..fails.
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