unicorns (prompt substitution)

At Best Buy we used to have something called ‘Blue Crew Bucks’ if our store hit budget for an entire year, we got a bonus. Now this meant that we not only had to make our insanely high budget in the holiday season, which wasn’t too difficult, but we also had to make budget in the summer months, when everyone was outside enjoying the weather and there were only 3 customers in the entire store. Because this was an impossible task, the employees nationwide began to refer the Blue Crew Bucks as the ‘Best Buy Unicorn,’ a fictional creature that was rumored to exist, but no one ever saw.

prompt 65

My old red wagon is sitting in the garage, full of tools and collecting dust. I remember my sister pulling me up and down the street in it, hitting a bump and falling out, cracking my head on the pavement. Years later my mom tells me a story of another red wagon, one my uncle had when he was a kid. A few days after my mom’s family moved to yet another new town my uncle, who was only 4 or 5 came home with his little red wagon full of vegetables. My grandmother asked him where he got them all and he replied that he got them from a garden from someone’s house. He could not remember where the house was so he could not return the vegetables. My grandmother scolded him and said that he could never do something like that again, he replied “your right, I can’t, because I took them ALL.” Staring at my little red wagon I can’t help but think my mother must be glad I never pulled a similar stunt.

prompt 64

Snakes, my mom is terrified of them. When she was little she lived in the south. Occasionally snakes would get into the schools and the janitors or staff would have to catch and kill them. They would cut off their heads with shovels and through the headless snakes into the dumpster. My uncle thought this was the coolest thing and wanted to show my mother, who was only 5 or 6 at the time. He lifted her up so she could see into the dumpster, all those dead headless snakes. She can’t so much as look at a picture of a snake without flinching.

prompt 63

I have a tannish orange piece of granite about the size of a water bottle, and the shape of a human heart. This one piece of granite I took from Cadillac Maintain in Acadia National Park. I was a kid at the time and did not know that you weren’t supposed to take granite from the mountain. It looks like it was broken off from another larger piece of granite, possibly a boulder. The bolder may have broken off the mountain, which was created when the earth pushed it up from the ground, leaving behind granite coast lines and Thunder Hole. This one piece of granite could be hundreds of thousands of years old, older than humans or even dinosaurs, and it is now sitting on my desk, being used as a paperweight.

theme week 13

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book of the series. When I was a kid I remember swimming in my pool while my mother decided to read me a book one of her coworkers had suggested to her. I swam around the pool listening to how Harry was left on his aunt and uncles door step and decided I liked it. Camping in the woods my dad read ‘The Chamber of Secrets’ to us as we sat around the camp fire. The same book was read to us in a similar fashion. Than the fourth book came out. Waiting in a long line at Borders at midnight, anticipating getting the new book. The fifth book, borders had a party all night up until midnight until the books release. The same for the next 2 books. Fortune tellers, arts and crafts, wizard duels, crazy crowds fill of people dressed up in wizard robes and carrying broomsticks. Lightning scars painted on their heads and round glasses perched on their noses, a whole store full to bursting of people who were anxiously waiting to find out what happened to the boy who lived, all fans of the series starting the journey with the first book that now sits tattered on my bookshelf.

prompt 57

My summer vacation started with work, twenty plus hours a week standing in one spot, ringing people out and repeating the same questions over and over again. “Hi how are you today? Do you have our membership card? Would you like to add on our protection plan? Do you need a bag for that?” I’ve said these things so many times I don’t even think about it anymore.

All the customers are the same, disinterested in me, being polite but otherwise finishing up their purchases and leaving. Then I get the horrible customers, the ones I want to punch in the face or scream at until my face turns blue. The ones that think that they know everything and I’m just a stupid cashier who doesn’t know any better. “Do you sell beer hear?” no this is an electronics store, why the hell would we sell beer?! “Where is your electronics department?” Um, look around you, your standing in it. “No that was supposed to be $19.99 not $59.99 the sign is just above it on the shelf.” Actually the sign below it not above it, you’re looking at the wrong one. “this was hanging on the peg for ten bucks!” actually if you had bothered to look you would have seen that the peg you grabbed this cable from is actually the peg for an iPhone case, which you would have known if you bothered to read or looked at the 50 cases hanging behind it. Didn’t you think it was strange that the peg for “cables” only had one cable and the rest were all cases? Use your eyes!

 But of course I can’t yell at the customers or point out their stupidity, I have to try to calm them down, apologize for something that is not my fault, and try to explain to them why I can’t give them this product for $50 cheaper. And so summer goes on, without school to distract me from work, and I continue to suffer the stupidity of customers.

week 12 theme

Ever notice how all white walls seem to have scuff marks halfway up? Well I have, not the kind of marks you get by knocking over the floor lamp and leaving a big scratch in the paint job, I’m talking about the kinds of black rubber marks left on all gym floors in middle and high schools around the world. Like someone kicked the wall six feet off the floor just to see if they could. But some of these marks are ten feet off the ground or higher, who can kick that high? I look at these marks and think ‘what, is this school full of spider men, climbing the walls for lack of something to do? Are people taking off their shoes and throwing them at the walls, trying to see who can throw theirs the highest?

Or maybe at night when everyone has gone home for the day a troop of monkeys, a whole basketball team of them, come into the room, dressed in jerseys and sneakers, and start a b-ball game. Jumping over desks, dodging attempts form the other team to keep them from scoring, screeching at each other in their own monkey language. Taunting one another and cussing each other out, using the walls as spring boards to slam-dunk the ball, leaving their scuff marks from their shoes behind on the walls. Cleaning up their empty sport drink bottles and banana peels off the floor, before heading out and leaving me to wonder where the mystery marks on the walls came from.

prompt 52

No ads in the pet section for a white cat, the kind I had when I was two, and disappeared when I was around seven. None at the humane society, none in the news paper. Check the photography section for dark room equipment, my sister wanted to start a dark room in the basement. There, in between ads for red lights and developing chemicals was a single misplaced ad, "four pure white kittens for sale". Best 13th birthday ever.

prompt 55

Stacks of sketchbooks half filled out, partially finished drawings, watercolor paintings just started and abandoned. Color pencils scattered around the room, a box full of acrylic paint, trays of watercolor paint, markers, ink pens, folders full of old work. pieces of jewelry, half put together then forgotten, pliers, beads, earring hooks spread everywhere waiting to be put to use. Everything an ADD artist needs to start new projects, now to just finish them... or start on that massive pile of books I need to read... or watch all those movies that have been stacking up.

prompt 53

The comic book store in downtown Bangor, the used book shop on Third Street. Bullmoose music and Books-a-Million, full of stories and unexplored adventures. My own personal heaven, walking down the street seeing these stores, going in and spending hours among the shelves, taking home dozes of new prizes to be kept forever. Keepsakes and adventures for the future

week 11 theme

Books are one of my favorite things in the world. Full of exciting new worlds and adventures that I may never go on, places I dream of visiting, regretting that most of them are not real. Going into book stores and browsing the shelves for hours, bringing home new treasures. I probably own a few hundred books, the three book shelves in my room are all almost full, and those don’t even include all the books a haven’t read yet that I have stored in my sister’s old room, about a hundred more books sitting in boxes, stacked beneath the window sill, waiting to be read and share their worlds with someone. Some so old the lettering is faded and they were written on a typewriter, read and reread hundreds of times and owned by who knows how many people, some brand new and modern, waiting for their spines to be cracked for the first time, maybe to go to new owners someday, and in a few decades become just as well loved and worn as the cracked as the classics on the shelf next to them are, hoping to become classics themselves one day.