Tag: creative writing

The Rise of the Band Geeks, Episode 7: The Army

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  1. An undisclosed photo of a soldier from the Army (source unknown).

    From the tumultuous tides that churn and swirl in a slurry we hailed / Prowling growlers and missiles of ice / That slosh in the slush of hushed currents / In frenetic eternity.

  2. Readily we traversed / The pulsating subsurface and tenuous night / The venous channels and crumpled paths / Under silent symphonies and sonorous skies / Until we found you.
  3. A subtle force, we convened / Upon the bristled surface below the fickle water-sky / Across the ground that sops up shrill water / Or rejects it, eschews it into whiteness / Scattered across the tensile blades / erupting from matted black nuggets.
  4. North of the end of the shifting stew we mounted / Our tuneful armor / Our wooden round shells hollowed by erosive war / Our skins stretched so finely clumsy flesh would rend / The precious surface before which we stewed / Our moldable bodies balanced securely between our vessels and our weapons.
  5. Kindred warriors deluded by our stillness / Fused with our minds and our spiral limbs / Their blurred hands and cylinder knives / Rounded blades that sluice and pound / The sparse depths into oblivion / Elevated us with their hastily wrought words and / Thunderous melodies.
  6. Laconic, we allowed / You to swarm around us intrigued by our plush plumpness and stitched-on jubilee / To accumulate in trickles and honey droves toward our piano demeanor.
  7. In this soft stupor we encased you / Ensnared you in stuffed cages / Choked you gently into piles of fluff.
  8. Now we breathe into your accordion lungs / We snuggle within your marimba memories / We wrap our tendrils round your cymbal hearts / We feed you / We cultivate you / We drive you toward the day when the city folds in on itself and the clouded day becomes our night / We whet our spongy forms against the steel and the temptation and the war chant / We fashion your limbs into brass weapons / Your voices into roars / We disassemble you and rewire you and arrange your valves in sinister permutations / We polish you until we are not of you but are you / Until the day when the stadium submits and all of you, all of you, answer to us.  We are coming– for you.

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The Rise of the Band Geeks, Episode 6: Those Tater Tots Are Pretty Good, Tho

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It turned out, after a tater tot and taco-laden discussion in one of the less crumb-coated tables of South Quad, that Hal adhered the most to college rivalry sentiments than did anyone else in his social circle.  Calling it a “social circle” included several caveats, of course, one of them being that Hal didn’t know half the people at the table beyond recognizing them as fellow band geeks, and another being that they were band geeks and therefore for the most part less adept at social interactions.

 

“I just don’t get what all the fuss is about.”  Kendra, a dirty blonde alto horn, wrinkled her nose.  “It’s so extra.”

 

“That’s what makes it great!”  Hal flung his arms outward melodramatically.  “It’s pure adrenaline!  Chaos!  Acrimony!”

 

“Eh….”  The lukewarm counter came from Millicent, a sophomore and fellow cymbal reserve with a lavender streak in her hair and a tendency to brood.  She was the one person at the table Hal somewhat knew.  “Pretty overkill, if you ask me.”

 

“Screaming at the refs isn’t really my idea of fun,” Kendra supplemented.

 

“We scream at the refs from anger, not because it’s fun.  The fun part is watching the other team lose!”

 

“I thought it was about watching our team win.”  Millicent’s voice was a deadpan.

 

“Well, that, too.”

 

Kendra mouthed something to Millicent that looked like the word boys.

 

“Well, as much as I love watching other teams fail spectacularly,” –this from a sophomore trumpet named Ryker– “I usually get more hyped when we win.”

 

Mildly incredulous that his tablemates did not exhibit an enthusiasm unknown to mankind, Hal turned to the fifth and final band geek munching away on tater tots, a freshman pic named Aaron.  He was a snarky lad prone to, according to his numerous anecdotes, butting heads with substitute teachers who mispronounced his name.  He’d often be reamed for messing up and then wind up outside the principal’s office twiddling his thumbs and wondering if the latest band video had caught him missing his dot.  Hal figured he was the type to revel in both the wins of the Wolverines and the losses of their sworn enemies, but he wasn’t so sure at this point.

 

“Oh, me?”  Aaron looked up from his tater tots.  “I kinda agree with Kendra and Ryker.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call screaming at refs fun, but I do love me a good football game.”

 

“I never said screaming at refs was fun.  I said the spirit of college football was fun.”  Hal defensively chowed down on his taco, then contemptibly popped a tater tot into his mouth while he was still chewing.  “Like the rivalry.  Not getting shorted by refs.”

 

“Didn’t they apologize–?”

 

Hal waved his hand dismissively.  “Not good enough.  You see, they done messed up, A–Aaron!”  He was interrupted as Aaron yeeted a tater tot at his head.

 

“Alright, that’s it.”  Millicent stood, surly, and scooped up her empty plate.  “I’m outta here.”

 

“What would you do that for, bro!?”  Hal gesticulated helplessly at the immaculate tater tot now marred by the filth of the cafeteria floor.  “Why would you waste a tater tot?  They’re not just tater tots–they’re most requested tater tots!”  Yet, as he spoke, he pumped the remainder of his taco into the air and launched it past Aaron’s shoulder.  “As per the menu!”

 

“Oh, it’s on,” Aaron returned, and seized his four remaining tater tots in his fist.

 

Author’s Note:  Band geeks do not yeet food at each other in actuality.  We’re more civilized than that.

The Rise of the Band Geeks, Episode 5: Beanie

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O pom-pom graced atop the knitted dome

Secured by laces tipped with aglets clear;

Beneath thee soft-striped stitches tightly roam

In chevrons spanning from thee to the ear.

O stitches stretched into a snug caress

Around the fragile flesh and mind and hair

You trap soft heat and ward off cruel duress

That would arise were this pale pate left bare.

O flesh, that warmth may bless thy frigid heart

Nestled within thee, that the stitches may

Envelop fragile you from the game’s start

And shield you till night voids the might of day.

May ev’ry precious strand upon your head

Of the band beanie undermine cold’s dread.

The Rise of the Band Geeks, Episode 4: War Chant

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The football players smashed into one another with the force of semi trucks, the sounds of their collisions drowned out by the pervasive screaming of fans.  Hal’s own throaty screech was lost in the chaos.  He wasn’t particularly loud, and his voice had gotten stuck at some point during puberty in the odd limbo between the voice of a boy and the sonorous, crisp boom of an adult male, subjecting him to frequent voice cracks.  His scream crackled now, and he could have been mistaken for fourteen or fifteen were he not a member of the marching band.

 

His right arm burned from the motion accompanying the excerpt from Temptation, commonly referred to as “Stands T” by the band.  Although he hardly felt it, the faint sensation was enough to distract him in the game.  He wasn’t much invested in it anyway, caring more about the stand tunes and watching halftime than anything else.

 

Why don’t we play a short version of W?

 

War Chant, the second half of the Michigan traditional duo that begins with Temptation, was just as musically robust and hype.  For the cymbals, it was a near-constant motion of pumping the arms up and down, interspersed with deep knee bends, 180-degree jumps (and one 270-degree jump), the infamous back bend, and, at the very end, a complex pattern of partner crashes that could literally kill you if you forgot to duck.  It was the perfect complement to the knee torture of Temptation, though W (or “Dubs,” as many people called it) contained knee torture, as well.

 

It is a universal truth that, when it comes to T + W, you can’t have one without the other…yet, in the stands, there was one without the other.  Hal had always been deeply saddened by this, as he loved both T and W, although they were grueling, especially when you were forced to do it inside the band hall with a mask on.

 

He always imagined a stands version of W drawing from the first part of the song, which involved a relatively complicated crash rhythm for the cymbals that alternated with eight-count drum features.  He’d never said anything about this to the band director or the drum instructor, seeing as he was a freshie reserve fresh out of a yearlong hiatus (though it might as well have been a punishment for something Hal didn’t do).

 

He swallowed as the play ended with the opposing team gaining three yards and prayed Stands W would become a real occurrence.

LOG_003_DISHWORM

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Illustration from Irma Beumer’s field notes of the dishworm’s life cycle.

 

Text transcribed from the notes of xenobiologist Irma Beumer:

The dishworm, so named for its dish-like carapace, is a small organism native to planet Khepri-1b. It lives in the dirt of temperate forests in the twilight zone. In addition to energy obtained from the photosynthetic cells on its “dish,” the mobile forms burrow and forage in detritus for food.

Its lifecycle is a complex one: the dishworm appears to be gynodioecious, consisting of female and hermaphrodites. Current research suggests that all members of the species start as females and later become hermaphroditic. Adult females are mobile and their eggs develop parthenogenetically into female offspring, while adult hermaphrodites are sessile and self-fertilize eggs, not unlike the life stages of Earth organisms of ferns or cnidarians. Early xenobiology research mistook the two adult stages as entirely unrelated organisms.

 

#1 spore/egg — small, scattered by winds — can be fertilized (egg) or self-fertilized pseudo-spore

#2 young dishworm stage (sessile) — undergoes embryonic development, suggested main nutrient sources are from the soil and photosynthesis

#3 juvenile dishworm stage — similar to stage 4a, but with a much shorter tail that grows additional segments with age

#4a adult stage — wormlike, the first recorded observations of this organism. Its anterior has four appendages for shoveling and combing dirt, while the heavy tail and the tail’s claws serve to anchor the organism in high wind conditions

#4b adult stage (sessile) — hermaphroditic, self-fertilizes eggs that are dispersed via wind forces. The soft “body” of 4a is not visible.