Writing Club Week 23

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[Irishgirl]

Writing Club Week 23 The rules are the same - ten minutes, no stopping, no editing, just write what comes to mind.


As usual the first one to respond to this week's thread sets the topic.



Join in, write, have fun   

The previous Writing Club entries are here:

Week 22 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,7193.0.html -- Weddings/Marriages

Week 21 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,7141.0.html -- Things that rhyme with "spring"

Week 20 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,7079.0.html -- Hope

Week 19 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,7005.0.html -- The things kids do to drive you nuts...

Week 18 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6940.0.html -- Ann Strongheart
 
Week 17 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6757.0.html -- Rollercoasters

Week 16 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6637.0.html -- Volcanoes

Week 15 http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6592.0.html -- Thought

Week 14: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6542.0.html -- Shyness

Week 13: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6472.0.html -- Ends

Week 12: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6409.0.html -- Unexpected Weather

Week 11: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6335.0.html -- Nature

Week 10: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6255.0.html  (BEST EVAR!!) -- Fill In The Blank

Week 9: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,6052.0.html -- Sports

Week 8: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5867.0.html -- Trust

Week 7: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5724.0.html -- Martin Luther King

Week 6: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5325.0.html -- Open Doors

Week 5: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5195.0.html -- Mind's Eye

Week 4: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5108.0.html -- Slinky

Week 3: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,5022.0.html -- Shoes

Week 2: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,4809.0.html -- Where The Wild Things Aren't

Week 1: http://www.themudflats.net/forum/index.php/topic,4675.0.html -- Dust Bunny

[0whole1]

Escape.

[Irishgirl]

That sounds very interesting. Escape it is. Thanks Owhole1.....get writing mudpups!! 

[Husky in Florida]

I've read most weeks but haven't dipped a toe in the club yet. The topic jumped out at me. Here goes:

Escape?

Most of us can't imagine a real life or death situation in which risking a limb would be a conceivable option in order to escape a horrible situation. I imagine abused women could write about this, but I've not experienced any situation where my life or soul was truly at risk and I needed to escape.....HOWEVER......

During college, I spent a summer staying at school (in Connecticut) in order to take an extra class with a favorite professor. I needed to fund this class with a full time job. I went down to the labor office in the city, feeling a little white and sheepish. I was hooked up with a factory job in a textile factory, having parlayed my cushy prior experience as an inspector in a groovy Colorado bicycle pack "factory" into "textile experience".

I reported to work on day one. Portuguese was the language of majority and I learned where I was to go from a very mean man. He was mean to me, he was mean to the women on the line, he was mean, probably, to his dog if he had one. That I could take. I learned that I was to use a large steam machine with strange arms and thousand degree steam to steam the almost finished product, shirts, which changed each day. Day one I spent my 8 hours at this machine, thinking of Dickens and trying to keep up. It was hard to keep up. I was an anthropology major and with every fiber of my being I tried to think that I was learning true empathy to the millions of exploited people around the world who worked in sweatshops.

Day one, I went home to the house I shared with 4 other girls, and relaxed on the couch. I felt guilty and miserable. My hands hurt, my head hurt, and my lungs were already filling with fluffy crap from the mill.

Day two. I returned, and got sworn at both in English and in Portuguese, by a woman who was working next to me. During the day the fear I felt about being yelled at by the boss, about doing the wrong thing, and about how I saw myself as some snot nosed college kid playing at the place where these real people had to live their real lives. I rode my bike the ten miles back to my house that day, and thought about escaping. Quitting was a bad option. Not quitting was an even worse option. Did I mention my hands and my lungs hurt? A LOT.

The people were not friendly. I didn't blame them. I blamed myself. I wanted to just put my head down and do the work...for minimum wage, which I think was in the two-three dollar range. I wanted to do this, but it was a sweatshop and I saw things I think they didn't want anyone with an education and an ability to alert the media to see. Things got worse. I got intimidated. I got yelled at some more. My hands and lungs hurt some more, a maggot tried to feel me up, and I was THRILLED.......because that meant I could ESCAPE with a valid excuse- to my parents and myself.

Two weeks later, after more of the same, I went outside during a morning break, got on my bike, and rode home to my nice little rental house. I escaped because I could. Dad would understand, but I would always carry this with me as a failure on many levels, only to be mitigated somewhat by a fairly successful letter campaign to the local media which I carried out with the help of the favorite professor in subsequent academic years. I'm not proud of any of it, but I think I gained some empathy which I think I already had in the first place- but walking the walk for a minute in the grand scheme of things means nothing.

People live and work and die in situations which most of us can't begin to fathom, and neither can I, really. But I do care.

And time's up.

[Irishgirl]

Husky, I had a summer job like that in London....I also ran.

[tamara]

I procrastinate and try to escape any annoying chore. My experience is petty, but let me tell you of this little 15 year old fellow I know in Geneva. He escaped from Sudan, doesn’t really know how he escaped, just remembers motions, fear, smells, crossing a see that he didn’t even know could exist. He came from one of these nowhere villages in the desert, parents killed in front of hi seyes, and then people he didn’t know, more people in unknown languages, and then Switzerland and snow he didn’t understand. He related some of this nigntmare to me, but it became real for me when, having been served a tea in a restaurant, I noticed that he was not putting the tea bag in the cup of hot water. I asked him if he prefered to drink something else, he said : No, I would like tea, not hot water. I showed him how to put the tea beg and the sugar cube in the water, and I realized then that he would have to learn from scratch all these little things we take for granted. He is now 18, doing great in school, has a girlfriend, but also nightmare of having had to escape, and controlling nothing during that escape.

[gratedcheese]

 Escape..10 minutes , just go. I have escaped death many times . Why did Ray die at 14, and I only caaught the door handles on my left arm, ...just enough to throw me into the ditch, Out of harms qway. Lisa was on my right, his liittle sister. ...after we crawled out of the ditch, she says wheres Ray?   ....A pair of red keds lwere tossed on the pavement,  He musta took his shoes opff, he runs faster that way.  ...dazed and totally confused walking down toward the car in the ditfch just up the road....Why is that guy screaming,I killed your son ...omg ...over and over.   turns out hes only 17, hit the brakes cause he saw some kids on the road. Needed  an alighnment, to bad the brakes grabbed to the right when he slowede down ....3 minjtes,,,, just go

...I saw my cousin turned insude out, I still see him
..but I escaped, why.
timews up  ....just go ... be brave hit post..

[Charcoal Sniper P.]

when I was in elementary school the first big project of every year was the hidden worlds display, it was really an excersize to get the kids used to the way things were done at the private alternative school I attended and also a way to get us to use our imaginations.  The project was  to be a model, a drawing and a story about your own personal hidden world, where you escape to in your imagination.  On the last day they were all put up around the school and the parents, teachers and other students spent the afternoon reading and looking at all the projects.  There were no grades.

I don't really remember the ones I did but for some reason I think they were always under a hill.

As a grown up now it saddens me that I don't have this to do every fall, I don't have to remember my hidden worlds and though I may have a vivid imagination there isn't time to go visit my escape place in my head, or at least not as often as I would like.  No matter how much I hated assignments in school, this school in particular had always fostered imaginative play and though I was always disappointed in my work (I thought I should be able to be a master artist as a child, and I wasn't) I think it is a wonderful project.  Maybe I can bring it back, make myself do it again, though without my rather scary (looked like the mean principle in the movie version of the book of Matilda) teacher reminding me of the deadline I'm not sure I could ever finish it.  Thats not to say I don't finish projects, I do everyday, but I think I may be someone who prioritizes work before play.

I do need an escape, or maybe a vacation, and as my finances dictate that may only be available in my own hidden world now.

[LettersFromEurope]

Soon you will escape to where none of us can walk.
Falliing through space you will explore,
what we cannot see.
You will see and fall for us and send back
waves of knowledge to flood our minds,
to fill our dreams with visions of
endless nights and star filled space.
Launched on your escape trajectory within the hour
to a place from which there is no return
you touch the Universe for those left behind.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Operations/SEM6G9ZVNUF_0.html

[The Blogger]

It was our cafe.

We meeting there, laughing there, eating there.

We sharing there, flirting there, closing place down.

And when you leaving me, you leaving me there.

But I still going.  For months.  With notebook from class we taking together "Introduction to Russian Literature."

But you dropping class.  After you dropping me.  Dosteyevsky so lonely without you by my sides.

Still I sitting in cafe.  Drinking your favorite drinks.  Hoping to see you again.


I spending hours there.  At our table.  I can thinking it's my cafe.  My table. 

And then I am realizing months turned into years.  I still having notebook with me, but classes is over.

Ghosts wear your perfume, follow me through alleyways.  Drinking espresso with one shot of foam.  Rereading Gogol, but not wearing overcoats.  Ghosts calling to me.  "Time to leave.  Time to fly."

I am rereading notebooks.  Wondering if I should keep them.  How can I throwing away when they reminds me of you?

And your hairstyle, your knee-high boots, your miniskirt.  That night in the rain when you tasting of lavender. 

Now ghosts are whispering: "Time to go."

And I dumping notebook in garbage can, hold on to Gogol.  No more espresso with one shot of foam.

Turning around, thinking I see you.  But it just girl with miniskirt not looking like you. 

She sit at our table.  Now she claim cafe.  While someone else in your arms, someone not me. 

You heard ghosts whispering years before I did.  They say "Time to go" and you hear them and gone. 

I walking to train station, not look back at cafe.  But listen to ghosts say "It time to escape."

[TRConnie]

Houdini's tricks were just that.  Tricks.  He never escaped from anything important.  A million times a day, people like us are engaged in tiny acts of quiet desperation where we escape, circumvent, side step, leap over, or crawl under the boulders, large and small, that impede us.  At times, with acts of great derring-do, we smash the boulders.  Other times we scale them with ropes and fingernails and precarious toe-holds.  Maslow stated there is a hierarchy of needs with shelter and food as the very basics, followed closely by belonginess.  We belong to one another and when we remember that, there is no need to escape.

Connie

[Irishgirl]

Thank you everyone for responding. As usual  it was another great writing week!
Writing Week 24 has started and can be found here.