On Tuesday, a young woman got on stage at Kieran’s Irish Pub during a story slam and admitted to about thirty or forty strangers she had no idea what she was doing. Her arm was in a cast for the second time in her life. The first time was twenty-one years ago when she was four and she blamed her brother, but it was half her fault, though she never let her parents know.
Then two weeks ago she was drunk and dancing and fell. The hangover the next morning, she said, was the worst she’d ever had and completely concentrated in her left wrist. No one she called could get her to the hospital. So she called her brother, who lives at him with his parents, is a drug addict and a depressive.
“I don’t know where I’m going with this, really,” she said. “It just came to me, like, tonight. That my brother, the one I said broke my arm the first time, whose life is totally screwed up, came to take me to the hospital. He was there when I needed him.”
The audience was pretty harsh that night and she walked away with a five or a six. There’s a certain kind of honesty no one wants to hear.
And she is the inspiration for this post, because I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing either. Or, at least, I wasn’t until I finished retelling the story.
I put off making a personal web page for years because I didn’t know what I wanted to say or how I wanted to portray myself. As an aspiring communications specialist, I’m deeply troubled by inconsistent messaging and style. But then I got sick of waiting.
So, here it is. A web page and blog. Rediscovering my obsessive roots, it’s going to be about the Twin Cities metro literary scene, because that seems to be my preoccupation anyway. For now.
This is why I came up to these cities in the first place and it’s been my poorly conceived mantra: anything with words. And so, I will write about my passion and work from there.
sam ferree | scribbler 