Writing Down the Bones Exercise

Great idea, Scott. I'd love to participate in this. Is this from Natalie Goldberg's book?

I wish it were home because I had my story all wrapped up in my head as I read yours. I hope home is not where the heart is. If it is, I am in trouble. You see, I am not at home, I am in Atlanta and I am headed toward home tomorrow. If my heart were home I wouldn't be pumping blood here in Atlanta, home of the yellow powder that makes you sneeze. A shame the Ohio boys had to come down here to lose last night. They could have been losers anywhere but then maybe that wouldn't have happened. Maybe they lost because their hearts were at home. My sister-in-law just came in the kitchen and caused me to skip a few thoughts but she reminded me I didn't know how to make coffee. Seems I left one of the innards out. That is a little like having your heart at home. You would expect your innards to be out if they stayed at home. Talk of staying at home, tomorrow we will stop in Asheville, NC. Not to see the famous Biltmore but to see the more famous Claus. Claus has come to America and I hope he didn't leave his heart at home. So much for a 10 minute article. This one is only about 4 minutes long and I have no idea where to go from here. I know, I will go to Walmart, we all go to Walmart on a regular basis. On the other hand, I may be making this sound like an advertisement which would go against the CoH. Oh, well, homeward bound, taking my heart with me. S'long.

I want to do one on breakfast, too!

7:41 a.m.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so they say. Cliched phrases are the most annoying things on the planet. I almost never eat breakfast. I have to take a thyroid medication in the morning, and I can't eat for an hour after I take it, but after being up for an hour, any hunger pangs I might have had disappear and I get busy and I forget to eat. But that doesn't mean I don't love breakfast. I love breakfast. I often serve it for dinner.

You can tell the quality of a breakfast place by their biscuits and gravy. The best biscuits and gravy I've ever had is found at Harner's in North Aurora, IL. They make their biscuits fresh, and the gravy is made with their own sausage, and it's creamy and not-too-thick, but thick enough to stay atop the biscuit, and thick enough to stay hot until you're done. Making biscuits and gravy at home is a poor substitute. I'm too lazy to make my own biscuits, and I use those crappy refrigerated ones, and it's just not the same, although they've come out with frozen ones that are much better. Eating biscuits and gravy warms me up and makes me feel satisfied and happy, and while eating it, I forget everything @!$%#ty in my life. That's why they call it comfort food, I suppose.

Chilequiles: Eggs, scrambled up with tortilla chips and cheese and green sauce and served with hot refried beans and rice and sour cream and pico de gallo and guacamole. You think Taco Bell is good for a hangover? Find a good Mexican restaurant that'll make you chilequiles. You'll be in heaven. The first time I had it, it was called something else, at a restaurant whose name I can't remember, in Austin last year, and they served up homemade refried beans, and I about died from pleasure. The firmness and crunch of the tortilla chips, the gooey melted cheese. Every bite, I have to get some chilequiles, some beans, some guac, some sour cream, some pico de gallo on the fork all at the same time. It takes forever to eat.

My kids will eat any crap for breakfast. I was violently opposed to frozen pancakes for years, because really, how hard is it to whip up some pancakes? And then I got addicted to Newsvine, and they got big enough to use the microwave by themselves, and now they microwave themselves pancakes all the time.

When I was a kid, we only got sugar cereals when we went on vacation. There were four of us kids, and we'd each get to pick out one small box. We'd also get one loaf of white bread and one jar of Jif peanut butter. All of it would be gone by the end of the first day, and we were junk-fuelled for hours from it. It was like crack. I don't deprive my kids of sugar cereals, but I don't let them get them all the time, and they can only pick out the ones that are on sale. For some reason, that makes me feel like less of a bad mother. Not that I'm a bad mother. Really.

All this talk of breakfast, and I want to eat some. I feel like making myself a quiche with spinach and onions and red peppers and cheese, so much stuff in it that there's hardly room for eggs.

7:51 a.m.

9:02

I used to be very wary of those things people call breakfast burritos. It just seemed somehow wrong to me, burritos are for dinner and why would you wrap eggs in anything anyway? Then a few weeks back, I was at a local coffee shop and I hadn't eaten all day. I had seen people eating breakfast bagels earlier and thought I would have one. I love breakfast bagels - when we make them at home we call them egg mcjermwiches because my husband makes them. I was very excited to have a breakfast bagel for lunch (it was after 2pm) so I approached the counter with my dollar bills grasped firmly in my hand.

Can I still get a breakfast bagel I asked? Sure, all day she said. I'll have a sausage, egg, and cheese bagel I said. The barrista looked concerned for a moment as she checked the bagel stock and then responded...um...all we've got is cinnamon raisin. Gross. Would you like to try one of our breakfast wraps? Um....sure I guess so.

Sausage, egg, cheese, and Potatoes wrapped in a honey-wheat tortilla. I tell you what, it was marvelously delicious and tongue tantalizingly terrific. What a pleasant surprise. I will be making them at home soon - ahhh home.

My husband and I are currently living in his parents house. It is his home...the one he grew up in. but it's not our home. We are preparing to buy our own home in the next few weeks. I think home is the place where you can run around naked and not worry about who sees. I think home is the place where you can put your feet wherever you want and you don't even have to take off your shoes first (unless you want to...it's your home...). The town of Cleveland is home to me and most of my family is here. Cleveland as home is different from house as home. It evokes feelings and memories but in a much more abstract sense then the tangible and visible comforts of a house that you've decorated and filled with your energy. Most of my stuff is in storage - but the storage unit is definitely not home. Soon...would you believe that I miss my own spoons? We've got some really cool spoons - good heavy ones - great for eating my Grape Nuts Trail mix for breakfast.

9:12

scott - this is one hell of a cool idea. have read through the lot and see everyone's talking about breakfast, Jerry's talking about Atlanta and merrydeath adding a whole lot of useful advice. I'm trying this without lookking up at all ; just a stream of verbal diarhoea coming straight out. Is that what they mean by straight throiugh processing? Who knows, who cares. This is a rreally cool idea. How Viki managed to get so much packed in that piece earlier and still have retained the formats and everuything else in 10 mins is ujust amazing. I know this piece is full of typos galore and I reckon that there is no way I can keep it going much longer - have only done less than 5 mins. But this is a really great idea. Would love to take it on on a regular basis. Good turn on Bubblewrap and some healthy exercise for us writers. Well that's about all from this rather poor and sorry contribution. I think i've done about 7 mins. Take carte. and by the way, it was very hard reading about everyone having breakfast - it is about 12:30 am and I stuffed myself with a rather late dinner and feel very ... bloated.

If anyone can make any sense of this crap, you're a far better reader than I am a writer.

I forgot I was going to do one on HOME.

6:53 p.m.

I am home right now. My feet are up on the coffee table, on top of a pillow. The coffee table is really hard and I like my feet to be cushioned. My son and husband are out front, playing catch. I can watch them through the window as I sit here, farting around on Newsvine when I should be writing any number of things I owe people, or have been assigned, or have sworn I would write as part of some kind of contest. My dog, Casey the amazing Border Collie, is outside the back door, barking to be let in. i am ignoring her. It was above 70 degrees today, but it is supposed to flurry tonight, and tomorrow it isn't supposed to get over 38 degrees. What the hell is that? I'll tell you what that is. That's home. That's Chicago. That's the midwest. One day it can be mid-70s, and the next day it can snow. Sometimes, all that happens on the same damn day.

My laptop's home is on my lap, because we got water in the basement, right under where I had just set up a nice, organized work area for myself, so now I have no working home. My lap is really hot right now. Do you think it's possible that my laptop battery is going to explode, and if so, will it kill me? If it doesn't kill me, might it just be necessary for me to receive some plastic surgery to fix my injuries? Because I'm getting old, and though I'd never willingly sign up for plastic surgery, if they had to give me some anyway, I'd probably ask for a minor brow lift, or a sculpting of something or another, or perhaps a boob lift. I could use a boob lift. Not a boob enhancement, however, because that's really not necessary. If my boobs were any bigger, I wouldn't be able to hold them securely in my hands when I run down stairs when not wearing a bra. If I don't secure them, they hit me in the face and knock me out.

Actually, that's not really true. They just knock around and push me off balance, and then I fall down.

I don't really want my laptop battery to explode because then I would lose all my data and bookmarks, and that would really piss me off.

What is this supposed to be about? Home? Hmmm. Shut the @!$%# UP, Casey, goddamn it you stupid dog just go lie down or something I am not getting up to let you in, I just let you out 10 minutes ago what the hell is the matter with you you stupid old half-blind @!$%#?

That was mean. I do love my dog.

Home is where I keep all my shoes. I have a lot of shoes.

Home is where my friends come over to laugh at me. I'm funnier when I'm drunk. Come to think of it, I could really use a cocktail, but I think I might be out of vodka. I think I finished off a bottle right before I left for Florida. Does this mean I have to go to the store, or that I have to drink beer?

Something smells in my home and I can't quite figure out what it is. It's a ghostly odor. I mean to say that I really do think there is a ghost odor in my home. When we bought this house, it was home to a very old obese and lonely woman, a shut-in who hadn't left her house in years. Neighbors used to trim her bushes and leave food at the door for her. When she died, they had an estate sale. When we came to see the house, it smelled really really bad. I cried and begged not to be made to live here. The tile in the kitchen was old linoleum, and curled up in the corner where her dog used to pee because she never let it out. None of the neighbors remembered the last time they had seen it. Some of them didn't remember her even having a dog. The ceiling tiles in the basement below the stain were stained yellow.

Those ceiling tiles and the linoleum are long gone now, but the smell sometimes drifts through. Thanks, Ruth Carpenter. I wish you would have gotten up and let your dog out more often.

Also, on the ceiling of the bedroom and the living room, there were perfectly round yellow-gray stains, from where her cigarette smoke funneled through the lamp shade. We found out from her son that she quit smoking in 1975. We bought the house in 1995.

I think I've gone overtime.

7:05 p.m.

11:27

On Breakfast

As I see it, there are any number of ways which people can be divided and categorized into, be that by the color of their skin, the place on this Earth that they were born in, or, perhaps, even their height. A more peculiar form of categorization comes from a very simple and, for most of us, an every day thing: breakfast.

Yes, I said that. Breakfast. I do believe that people can be divided by the breakfast (or lack thereof) that they eat. Allow me to explain through example.

The Meat Man

There are those people -- I know some -- that insist rather vocally that their breakfast contain some type and some absurd quantity of meat. Often times they are the working man -- big, mildly greasy, and not without a foul mouth on him. A picturesque housewife hovers in the background as she serves him his 2~ pounds of morning meat.

Eggs - They're eggs

I have, unknowingly at the time, stepped into the most complicated field of breakfast-person-analysis known to man. Just because a person eats eggs does not make them peculiar, but rather how they eat their eggs (and I don't mean whether they use a spoon or a fork). For instance, a person who prefers scrambled eggs is most likely different than the one who likes eggs benedict -- an obvious class difference stereotype, I know, but the validity holds. Think about this one for a bit. Think of the people in your life, and the sort of eggs they eat. It might explain a lot, or it might just make your friends wonder why you keep asking everyone about how they like their eggs.

The Protein-Bar Superwoman

Strong, independent, and on a diet since she turned 16, this woman is probably moderately successful, perhaps has been divorced (or tragically dumped), and thinks protein bars are the greatest things in the world, even if they do taste awful. She exercises non-stop and probably has the figure of a small sapling -- easily able to be blown away by the slightest breeze. Though men most of the time do not find this attractive, she still thinks they do. *sigh*... women.

As you see, now, breakfast is not just a major part of our day, but of our entire life. The next you sit down to eat your breakfast, stop and think about it -- and then eat it. The eatings the fun part.

11:37

Well, I suppose that took slightly less time than most of my articles. But only slightly.