Risky business...

I just excised the following from my previous LJ Idol entry:

The sergeant in charge of the 90th Replacement Depot had a lot on his mind that rainy day Bud Armstrong walked into the hutch along with the other fresh meat from back in "the World." The rain meant no choppers were flying – which had the upside of not offering any targets to the NVA gunners – but the major had said the request was urgent, so the sergeant loaded the replacements into the back of a truck, along with ammo, C-rations, and a bag of mail, and sent the truck out to a weary, battered company at the edge of Tay Ninh province. As the truck rumbled off, he picked up the phone and arranged for an escort to rendez-vous with the truck before it left US-held territory.

The rain caused the truck to get stuck in mud not long after setting off, on a stretch of road that had been secured by US forces the week before. Apparently, nobody had passed the word about the road being secure to the Viet Cong, and so the survivors of a short, one-sided firefight were quickly taken prisoner and herded back toward the VC base at Nui Ba Den.

Several hours later, when the prisoners emerged from the thick, asphyxiating jungle into a clearing, Bud tapped the man next to him and quietly said, "I think we can make a run for it. Do you...?"

"Doong noi!" yelled the closest captor, who excitedly ran up to Bud and body-checked him with his AK-47. The young Vietnamese then stepped back and started prodding him with its bayonet. "Dee trock!" he commanded. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds and made everyone squint.

"He wants you to shut up and go over there," said the driver of the ill-fated truck, motioning with his head as he cradled a badly wounded arm. Bud began to move in the indicated direction, then turned around and started walking backward, to keep the sun out of his eyes and his face toward the enemy. Everyone – friend and foe – had turned to look at him as he walked in this manner, which is why only he saw a dot detach itself from a fast-approaching swept-wing silhouette that was above and then behind him before he could think.

"What the…?" wondered Bud, just before a shock wave catapulted his consciousness into a fog of unremitting pain.

All of this is background, which I summarized to its bare essentials and inserted at the beginning of the updated version, because the whole thing really isn't required to tell the story I want to tell.

Cheers...

Idolatry...

The animals got me up early this morning, and as I let Shiloh out for her morning business, it occurred to me that the first part of this week's essay had absolutely nothing to do with what I'm trying to say (except to show that Bud - in suggesting an escape - shows signs of being the one in the crowd whose thinking naturally falls "outside the box"). So, seeing as how the entry deadline has not passed (and since there are precedents), I've taken the liberty of deleting the entire section.

In addition to making the piece more focused, it also cuts the overall length, which isn't exactly at the top of my list of concerns, but seems to be a criterion some others use, among others, to evaluate an essay.

One of the sites I follow on a regular basis is Lifehacker, and they had a post up the other day about a site called 750 Words, which implements an idea called "morning pages" from a book titled The Artist's Way.

The point is to get in the habit of starting off one's day with three pages of writing about anything and everything that comes into your head, unedited and uncensored. "If you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day," says the site, on its welcome page, "it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day." Unlike LJ, I'm not even sure one can make one's tappings readable by others.

Anyway, by midday yesterday, even though I had tried to brainstorm this week's topic in a 750words session, all I had was a jumble of idea threads instead of an idea. I was pretty sure I wanted to turn Richard Lovelace's proposition that "stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage" on its head: just because you're not behind bars doesn't make you free, either.

There's support for that from Bacon, and his observation about giving "hostages to fortune." This led me to consider comfort zones, with a brief digression on my stepdad's incredibly tight comfort zone, eventually leading to Shakespeare's Hamlet, who notes, in his famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy, that we humans would "...rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of." The list doesn't stop there, but I think I've adequately illustrated the point.

I somehow became fixated on writing a poem, using the metric scheme in Lovelace's To Althea, From Prison, in much the same way that I wrote a reponse to High Flight during last season's Idol, but didn't think it was a wise course of action, either from the point of view of the competition or the time available to me.

By 3 pm, when it was clear that no new assignments were likely to arrive in the inbox, I got to thinking that instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I needed to go hunt it down before grinning Fate loaded me down with an overfull plate of work. The start of my initial version sort of illustrates that, and it's only after I've made Bud Armstrong a double-amputee that the story really starts.

I must admit that when the idea of deleting that first part occurred to me, I was a little shocked and resistant to the idea. But then something took over inside my head, and I found it easy to bid the text adieu. In the end, I think the updated piece is stronger.

Cheers...