Born to Write
When I was in second grade, we would write stories in pencil on a grey scratch pad. If you liked the story a lot, you would ask the teacher Mrs Bledsoe if you could publish it. Publishing it meant writing it out on pretty coloured paper, drawing illustrations, binding it with a couple of staples, and covering it with contact cellophane.
My favourite shit was called “The Flying Hotdog”. Born to write baby. Basically the story was just a rip-off of an old joke.
“Hot dog walks into a restaurant. Waiter says sorry, you’re going to have to leave… we don’t serve hotdogs here.”
So basically the story is that this hotdog can fly, and it goes around to all these restaurants – MacDonalds, KFC, Sizzler – all big chains because those were the only restaurants I knew – but he gets denied everywhere because they don’t serve hotdogs. I don’t know how it ends. I guess the hotdog finally gets service and someone eats him. How fucking creative is that.
I published the story, made the little yellow booklet. Everyone would always colours people’s skin pink. There was no tan texta so I would use orange for skin colour. I figured it was closer than pink.
“Hey Kurt, why do you colours people orange? Skin isn’t orange.”
“It isn’t pink either.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t!”
So one time Mrs Bledsoe said that next week we’d have a competition for our books, and we’d have different categories, funniest, best drawing, best story and so on.
So we laid out all the books around the room and all the kids went around to look at the books. Then at the end we all voted to see which books were best.
Funniest: Flying Hot Dog
Best Drawing: Flying Hot Dog
Best Story:… After two or three of these coloured stickers put on my booklet and all, Mrs Bledsoe decided that my book couldn’t be voted on any more.
Ayn Rand
So I guess the moral of the story is that my stories have probably gotten worse over the years… Nowadays they have hardly any illustrations. Lame.
A couple of weeks later I saw Andy Falconer writing on his scratchpad… a little story he called “The Flying Hamburger”.
I said “Hey you’re biting my shit!” But this was second grade so it came out as:
“Hey Andy – you can’t do that – you’re stealing my story!”
“No but my story is different – he goes to Sizzler.”
“He goes to Sizzler in mine too.”
“Oh.”
And he stopped writing… tore off the page.
