Sunday, May 29, 2011

Unpublishable Haiku # 13

Your wind in these trees
sounds like cars on a freeway
Boquete evening

                                                                            by Fred Shultz

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Another Weird Thing

So I've written about a couple a weird things since Christmas.  I wrote about the time I accidentally broke a curse on an old slave trading island in Cameroon.  I wrote about getting robbed by a deaf-mute with a spear gun and a snorkel in Guatemala.  I wrote about getting a tattoo in Tijuana, Mexico from a guy with a bull ring in his nose and a fetish on his desk.  I wrote about chasing a black bear down a hill.  There's a bunch of others, too.  Ben wrote about a lot of weird things, too.

Another weird thing happened when I was about nine years old or so.  It was hot and muggy in Yaounde, Cameroon, so I used to sleep with a fan next to my bed.  One night I went to unplug the fan in the living room so I could take it to my room.  My pinky stuck on the prong before the fan was fully unplugged.

Wham!  I was soaring through space.  I saw planets and stars.  I figured I was dead for sure.  But just in case I wasn't dead yet, I yelled for help.  The babysitter heard my halfhearted tone (Help, help, help, help), and figured I was messing around.  Eventually she told my younger sister to go check on me.  Tammy came in the room and saw me on the floor, shaking.  She went back and told the babysitter that she'd better come and see.

When the baby sitter touched my arm, she got a shock herself.  I guess she grounded the circuit because then I came back to my house from outer space.  I seem to remember that I was pretty proud of myself.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Unpublishable Haiku # 12

This one is called ¿Tienes fuego, Amigo?

Man in the hotel
In San José, lights a match
As if his millionth

                                                                        By Fred Shultz

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Monkey Wrench

Yellow police tape zigzagged the block; emergency lights flashed through the darkness in the rain.  I stood outside my car wrapped in my trench coat with my notebook and micro-cassette recorder, wondering where to begin.  I stood behind the yellow police tape looking at the lights reflecting off the wetness of the road.

I began knocking on doors, trying to find an eyewitness--somebody who saw something or heard something or knew of someone who had.

They police kept saying there would be a press conference but it was getting real late.  I was tired and hungry.  So I left and drank some beer at The Gables.

In the morning I went to the office and went to work filing my story.

"Roselle man reportedly spent his 45th birthday yesterday, shooting his wife in the head, ramming a squad car in a high speed police chase, getting shot by an officer, and ended the evening finally by drowning in a Carol Stream detention pond." Then I spent two hours with Ben, Mark, and Bill sitting out on the loading dock smoking cigarettes and watched the sun go down behind the train tracks and the clock tower.

I had an idea for a game.  According to the rules, each week we would agree upon a word, and once agreed, would spend the duration of the week figuring ways to fit it into our stories.  When the papers were printed we would determine the winner based on the quantity of occurrences as well as quality—extra points for headlines, double extra points for quotes.

We decided that the first word would be “monkey.”  Then we watched the sun going down in silence--each of us thinking of how to get our sources in city hall, school boards, cops, and park districts to say, “monkey.”

My stories, that week, took longer than usual, as I went through all the possible combinations of the word "monkey" in my head in every potential context.
That week I scoured the Carol Stream community for monkey business.  I nosed around in search of people monkeying around in a newsworthy manner.  This game proved much more difficult than I had anticipated.  Finally I came across a monkey wrench, though perhaps it was a bit of a stretch.  Turns out a West Chicago school district had to reevaluate their construction plans because of limited funds.  Normally in such a situation they would ask the voters to pass a referendum.  This time, however, the bad economy proved to be a monkey wrench.  The voters would never pass a referendum in this economic climate.  Talk about a monkey wrench.  I even attributed the sentiment in paraphrase form to the school board president himself, who felt there was a monkey wrench in the referendum idea, or so I inferred from his comments about the economy and all that.