/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6321636]

Hello, /lit/erates.

Could I have some constructive criticism? I accidentally wrote an overly involved thing while responding in a thread. It might have potential?

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WellI grew up in an extremely Southern Baptist household, which meant that I also grew up thinking that ritual cannibalism and live burial wasn't weird. You may take every stereotype you're now thinking of and then apply it to the first ten years of my existence. Young earthers high on Jesus, the Spirit, dodgy epistemology, and an ensuing even dodgier understanding of the hard sciences. We were the chosen few and demons crept in every shadow. Little hawks that knew it was the most noble to join the service of our country (for She was Blessed) or the Lord. Perhaps they were the same thing.

It was a gradual descent from this all-consuming light, but eventually when my eyes adjusted to the dark I was quite dissatisfied with the gaps in my knowledge re: reality. I hid textbooks I stole from the public high school in the ceiling of my church's youthroom. They supplemented and frankly surpassed my homeschooling on the four days of the week I was there. It was a simple matter to stand on stacked chairs and poke a ceiling tile aside with a yardstick. There was no insulation in that layer, which was fortunate.

I still love mythology. When people talk about their gods, they talk about themselves, except for when they talk about their government or dreams or truth. It's ugly and fascinating.

...

So, the homemade bomb club is a result of zero parental supervision, mutually enabling pyromania, and unscrupulous fireworks stands.

In the summers from the age of seven to thirteen, my friends and I would buy as many cheap fireworks as we could with allowance money, fake ids, and sad faces. It went double for after-holiday sales. Once we had enough raw ingredients stolen from construction sites, we would experiment with pipe and canister bombs. Good times. There was a nice green belt in one of our backyards where we set them off when the parents were gone to choir practice on Tuesday nights. It was a great feeling, drizzling different consistencies of decomposed styrofoam in oils and gasoline over painstakingly made and satisfyingly solid pieces of workmanship. Blood from careless seams and saltpeter in equal amounts, nearly. You would drizzle the styofoam in loops across the ground until you stood far back in the tall cool grass and fireflies droning unaware of the arrival their shorter-lived, wondrous cousins. You crouch against the shrapnel and toss a match underhand and then kiss your eardrums goodbye. Only pussies flinch.

It wasn't a bad life.

[Anonymous No.6321644]

>>6321636
The hang glider incident is about as strange as the rest, but it's true.

I was seven years old and we were studying Leonardo DaVinci in school. I loved the delicate traceries of his sketch lines and the nearly lyrical details of his blueprints. The diagram of wings, the one you're thinking of-- it stuck in my head like a broken gear. So simple, so beautiful. So attainable. I wrote lists of materials in sloppy penmanship with my left hand and looked lost in hardware stores. Of course the growing pile of debris was for my father, and was not piling up ungently in cruel angles under my mattress. It took months and learning some rudimentary algebra for proper scale measurements, but I had a working model in pieces in my closet behind the winter clothes. When they were gone, father at work, mother and brother at a violin lesson in the middle of a Monday afternoon, I bolted and hinged the parts, stretched the canvas, and climbed the 3-story whiteoak in my backyard. A rope on a three-dollar pulley served to bring the glider up beside me. I straddled three trembling narrow limbs like live wires or a nervous horse, digging into the bark with my feet while I belted the crosspiece to my body. Shoulder to ribs across each side, ribs to waist. They creaked and swayed in the young high wind as I went from straddle to kneeling to toes digging like a bird as I swayed like a bigtop tightrope. Sweaty fingers at the grips the ends scraped the trunk and my face.

Gods help me I jumped.

First five feet were limbs lashing me like whips in freefall, next five were like plummeting in that moment before you wake up, next three were realizing I was not asleep, next five were realizing I was awake and alive and the air was pushed from my lungs like water bitter like sap, air screaming against my sides and elbows. Then I realized in the middle that I was a mortal thing of bones and meat and I was going to die. The last ten feet I swept up an inch and went forwards in a shallow parabolic arc, ending in a harsh bloody skid across St. Augustine grass that felt like being born.

[Anonymous No.6321645]

>>6321644
There's more, of course. Books more. Years of being my father's favorite theologian, years of believing I lived in a just universe and was a creature deserving of heaven. Years of knowing that my depression was almost certainly demonic possession. Learning that I really liked drawing girls. Learning that I liked girls. Learning that there was actually medication for people experiencing seasons of abject nihilism followed by absurd confidence, and then deciding not to use it. Years of this awful, strange, hilarious shit.

I'll leave you for now with a story about bloody water.

In swim team, when the coaches would leave, there was a game. We took six large traffic cones from the roads, heavy and strangely inflexible, placing them in a closet. We would place three cones on each side of the deep end and then split into our predetermined sides and formations with jeering and laughter. Wobbling and sitting and splashing on the edges of the pool while the captains shook white-knuckle hands. After a count, it was bedlam.

All a team had to do was secure all six cones on their side, under the water, for any length of time. There were no other rules. Strategies, yes, and traditions, but no actual rules. Backs darted like fish, anaerobic, turning on dimes. Forwards, such as myself, grew their nails long and filed them to points, hands and feet both. Thickness and length were points of pride and viable job skills. I had a thin golden scar, rippled close to my skin in the shape of a crescent over my right shoulder. I remember the skin tearing open against the chlorine and adrenaline, feeling nothing, seeing the pink fan out and turning on the man with my teeth in his calf. It broke tradition, but felt natural and was unplanned. There were no hard feelings later. My shoulder scabbed soon enough when we were dry and victorious, and his skin was only bruised save one bright point. We nodded to each other, quietly.

[Anonymous No.6321946]

try to trim it down to a hundred words or so, and put meme arrows in front of it

[Anonymous No.6322869]

bump

[Anonymous No.6322882]

>>6321946
>put meme arrows in front of it
kek
First of all delete everything in second person, it doesn't work. Even saying "one may take every..." is better.
nevermind I read the rest it's trash. keep reading

[Anonymous No.6322890]

OP how harsh do you want it
on a scale of 1 to harsh

[Anonymous No.6323402]

>>6322890
Whatever you feel like.

>>6322882
I've never understood the hatred of second person in non-academic writing.

[Anonymous No.6323409]

>>6321946
Oh, that's unkind! I'm nearly certain that people can read non-greentext paragraphs.

>>6322869
I guess you wanted to hear what others had to say, but I rendered you speechless with the awfulness? Taking this as an absurd compliment.

[Anonymous No.6323466]

>>6323402
>I've never understood the hatred of second person in non-academic writing.
It's alienating. I want immersion, not to be reminded of myself. If you want to address the reader, do it in an ironic aside. See Shakespeare's soliloquy's or the "dear reader" apostrophes of Dickens as a starting point.