It begins.

I made this blog so I would make myself write again. I started an essay about a year ago that I never finished, and taking my own cue from the My Office Diaries, I guess if I start posting it in unfinished chunks I'll force myself to get it done. Once this story is finished, I'm going to try to make everything that goes up here essay-ish.

My degree is in creative non-fiction, which means I write memoirs. I realize I am 24 and don't have that many memories worth writing about, but sometimes I can work with what I have. I heard from my most prolific writing professor that writers are lucky to get published more than twice a year, and shouldn't even hope to get a book published until they're about 50, so here's my plan: write essays and post them online, then take them down when they are finished. Y'all get to read them, and I have a completed essay that becomes future material for my book that I'll publish...25 years from now. So no one will remember my stories even if I become an internet SENSATION, and the internet should be some kind of hard-wired molar implant by then and no one will give a monkey's about my dinky little blog anyway.

I'll be posting this story in chunks, not by creating new posts but by editing the original post so it's easy to read and not broken up into backwards pieces in blog post form. Once it's up and in some kind of finished state, I'll leave it up for about a week and then take it down and turn it into something final. Them's the rules. Let's see if I can stick to them.

Enjoy. As of now, this essay is called People Walking.

****

This road is not pretty anymore. For about 12 hours last week it was absolutely beautiful – snow covered everything, and the trees were coated with a thick layer of hoar frost, which happens when wet fog descends and its water droplets freeze onto trees and mailboxes and signposts like the fuzzy ice that grows on condensed lemonade cans in the back of the freezer. The world was in white and black but seemed to reflect a million colors from the sun, as if the glitter and googly-eyes aisle from Jo-Ann Fabrics had exploded all over I-83. Driving by, you could almost hear the tinkling and jingling of icy, perfect snow crystals as the heat from the sun locked them all together, melding them to every single thing in sight, like glaze in a kiln. Then, on that day, this road was pretty.

Now, it’s like something out of a Great Depression documentary. It’s not white and black but grey and brown with plowed snow and churned up salt. The clouds have blotted out the sun, taking away that lightbulb radiance from the sky and replacing it with some washed out florescent equivalent. Every now and then there is a glimmer of that beauty this road wore so serenely just last week – through the bent and broken trees, bowed and cracked by the weight of 45 inches of snow, a hill lies untouched by plows or sleds, and over there is a car no one shoveled free of it’s terrible prison, perfectly domed and pristine. “Somebody’s unemployed,” I thought, as I looked at that car, almost jealous. I don’t know why, since I just spent the majority of 2009 lying in a festering pool of my own abject unemployment, begging the working world to take me back. It finally did, and now I am one of these hideous, salt-colored cars lined up to merge into the one lane Baltimore City bothered to plow on this four lane interstate. We are waiting in the highway soup line, wondering if we’ll make it through the green light before traffic slams the door shut in our faces.

Whatever. At least I’m not at work. And thank God tomorrow is Saturday. I’ll sleep until noon, not because I want to or because I can, but because I have to. I can’t erase the week otherwise. I have realized, if set my alarm for 30 minutes before I have to get up and if I hit the snooze six times in a row, it’s a little easier to get up on work days. I have also realized if I use that last 5 minutes before 7 a.m. to remind myself that my day is going to be horrible, I can handle it.

This has been the worst week of my working life. Ice dams in the gutters of the condominium complex where I work have forced running, melting water in through the windows, walls, ceilings, and up through the carpets of almost 72 units, causing untold water damage and unholy mildew growth. Now that things have begun to melt a little, glassy icicles seven feet long are hanging over every doorway like claws, and three-inch thick frozen waterfalls have adhered themselves to the siding. The Complex looks and feels like it’s being eaten by an enormous ice monster - one that wraps its victims in a white sheath before liquefying its insides, like a spider. The phone in the site manager’s office is ringing off the hook. People call me every day to let me know their ceiling is falling down and beg me to do something about it. They have packed up their children and moved into hotel rooms, which they expect us to pay for after we’ve fixed their leak damage for free. They are demanding appointments with the contractors we brought in, denying us access to their units when they are not home, and blaming every issue they’ve ever had on the embarrassing rain dance we have the gall to put forth as property management. I am the assistant to an emotionally stunted site manager and a skeleton crew of El Salvadorians trying to steer this ship away from an iceberg it has already hit. It is not going well.

There is a crazy, crazy man who jogs shirtless on the route I take to the Complex regardless of the weather. I know if I’m on time by what part of the road at which we cross paths. If he makes it to Bellona Avenue before I do, I’m going to be late. I always look forward to seeing him, though, because a little dose of genuine crazy puts the vernacular crazy in perspective. This snow might be crazy, but jogging in the snow blows the actual snow out of the crazy waters and back into the kiddie pool of the mundane and average. As far as I’m concerned he might as well be jogging on a golf course with a metal rod on his head in a thunderstorm. On the coldest of days, like today, he’s out there in black skintight jogging shorts, no shirt, with a sweatband holding back his almost-long hair and nothing restraining his chest hair, pounding away at the asphalt, somehow trusting his own perspiration not to freeze his nostrils shut. I realize today he’s jogging, in sneakers, in black snow that comes up to his shins. The white menace has eaten the sidewalks, miles and miles away from where its stomach is digesting my building. And for the first time all week, a thin beam of relief pokes a hole in the black cloud I pull over my head every morning and I think, Dear god. I could have been walking dogs in this nightmare.

****

Stay tuned.