Thread: Be Careful What You Wish For . . . aka Spaced Repetition (500 words)

Author's Note:

Adult Theme

This is a true story. Only the names have been changed.



Beginning with his earliest memories, Strop avoided sustained activity generally. In time, “path of least resistance” became his doctrine.

Possibly this was due to growing up in circumstances where others needed to do everything for him. He never acquired the motivational drive to both start something for himself and also see it through.

Firstly, he’d been born with skeletal dysplasia, a condition rendering him unable to walk until corrective procedures were undertaken at the age of four. Secondly, and more importantly, he possessed a neurobiological deficit causing general clumsiness and complete lack of social awareness; time would show the consequences of this second flaw to be of greater seriousness than lack of ambulation.

These conditions combined to create an environment of almost total coddling by others. Consequently, as already noted, he never acquired the cognitive force to start and finish anything.

What did come into being for Strop was a lifetime pattern of briefly acquiring an interest in many things, and then abandoning them. But a requirement for sustained effort, in anything, sounded a death knell for that particular activity.

Nowhere was this more evident than in satisfying his sexual urges. Strop had no feelings of tenderness, emotional closeness or caring, for individual women. And whilst he mayn’t’ve articulated the thought in so many words, ejaculation was his primary goal. Given his lack of social skill, the painful effort of courting a woman simply as a way to ultimately eject his semen just wasn’t worth the candle.

But then he discovered that prostitutes were quite happy to give him inexpensive blow jobs, in his car, and he was content.

Then he met Daisy.

Daisy was a blue-eyed curly-haired blonde, and she was already married. How it all started was unclear. Something just clicked between them. And given her marital status, there was no need for all the bullshit. They were together for one thing only.

Eventually it became even better, with still less effort required by Strop, when Daisy was introduced to oral sex. After just two false and messy starts she rapidly became an eager and enthusiastic devotee of the art.

This, then, became the major pattern for his life. Taking things easy. Avoiding effort.

Regular job dismissals became a component part of this blueprint.

Eventually he married, and the pattern emerged again when his wife filed for divorce. He asked why.

“Because you never want to do anything.”

Strop shrugged.

In time he manipulated the system into putting him on the social security payroll fifteen years early. All he then needed would be some other de-motivated character to share the bills and he’d be set. He found her and created the retirement haven he sought.

He needed a hobby, and purchased a computer. He didn’t have the faintest idea what he might do with it. He just waited for inspiration to hit.

He’d always enjoyed messing about with words. Words were one constant in his life. He thought he might write.

He commenced writing a story.

Thirty thousand words in, and the idea began to lose its glamour.

And so Strop finished up staring at a blank monitor, and wondering where it all went wrong . . .

Ox, darlink. I would definitely buy your autobiog, but you're going to have to make it longer than this to earn my twenty quid.

Could you expand this into a Walter Mitty style short fiction? Wouldn't take much. It needs a bit of character interaction to achieve that, methinks.

So much good stuff in there to develop.

Funny you should mention the character interaction. I’d been going to put a note at the top to the effect that covering a lifetime in 500 words doesn’t leave much room for that type of stuff.

Hey, all the loose ends are already half done. Perhaps a ghost writer is indicated . . .

Originally Posted by The Backward OX

Perhaps a ghost writer is indicated . . .

I'll do it for ten grand and a years chookie eggs.

It was late in the Antipodes when I originally replied and my synapses weren’t all firing. The suggestion seems to be either this is or should be turned into fiction.

Not that it is but that it should be, my little antipodean grumpling. And you'd be writing what you know...

I dunno whether it’s ‘cos I’m old and tired, or maybe I’m just inherently not the smartest duck on the pond, but it’s taken me all this time to figure out precisely what you meant by “expanding this into Walter Mitty style fiction.” It wasn’t that I didn’t know Walter Mitty. It was that I couldn’t figure out how to marry that concept to a recounting of real life.

But now I think I’ve got it and by George I think you may be on to something. I’ll have to doodle a bit, see what comes out the other end. Anything’s got to be better than the novel that was being made up a word at a time.

You strike me as an interesting fellow. I would read your life story.

I'd read it. I'd even buy a copy, Ox-cube. Do it.

I’ll be an OX-cube any day, if it's this lady who's getting me hot.