Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Estrella and Lisa’s Bare Bones Story

This story was generated by combining two random lists: (Estrella) -cactus, metal, future, fan, slippers, hair dryer, flat, shorts, monitor, blankie (Lisa) –birthday cake, wristwatch, clogs, bad hair day, insomnia, olive oil, dentist, grocery store, mountain road, snowman.

The last straw, or "Hello my name is Cas and I'm a technoholic"

Left to my own devices I wouldn't have pushed through the "performance area" in such an all fired hurry to get back to the blazing hot car.

I would have stood politely with the other gawkers at the civic center entrance watching the Elvis impersonator sing Hound Dog in his flat nasal voice.

I've always thought that Elvis was a pretty hunky dude, so I guess you could call me a fan, but not a starry eyed one.

But not even a starry eyed fan, unless they were suffering from twelve years of insomnia, wearing carpet slippers and a tin foil hat would have been able to confuse this particular "Elvis" with the real thing.

This guy was having a seriously bad hair day, and the jumpsuit shorts didn't really add to his performance any.

So as I say, I would have stood there, running through my grocery store list in my head, people watching and blocking out the "music" until there was a natural break in the flow of the crowd.

But Cas had other plans. She needed to get back to the car so she could plug in her crackberry and check her blog and monitor her Twitter account.

And yeah, I know it's called a blackberry, but bloggers with "I'm on Twitter!" in the side bar of their website with the exclamation point at the end may as well have been announcing "I'm on Crack!" and Cas was definitely in that minority.

Or it may be the majority now. I don't know.

I DO know that I lost half of a pair of perfectly good clogs in the deep mud following Cas as she barreled through it elbowing other dentists out of her way in her haste to get to the car and her techno "fix."

I pulled my poor bedraggled clog out of the brown goo and decided that no amount of olive oil was going to shine it back to life.

I followed my friend politely, limping on my one shoe, excusing us both and smiling my way through the crowd.

I was worried about Cas.

Her blackberry battery had died during the second speaker's presentation.

After a few minutes she had started to kind of vibrate in her chair.

When her eye started twitching and she began rocking and whimpering while pushing the dead buttons on her drained technotoy I made up my mind that we were going to have to talk about her addiction.

I had tried to talk to her about her problem when we went to the restroom after the conference ended, but she just brushed my concerns aside and said that she could stop anytime she wanted to.

That it wasn't a big deal.

But I wasn't convinced.

Things had gotten a lot worse in the last six months or so.

I was starting to think that Cas was a friend I needed to walk away from while I was still able to do it.

Maybe with a few of my possessions still intact.

Sighing, I thought about my future without Cas, but then that got me to thinking about my past with Cas.

I looked at my wrist and remembered that I'd lost my wristwatch back in December when Cas wrecked my jeep on that lonely mountain road while texting and lol(ing) to a "follower."

That poor snowman never even saw us coming.

Then there was the incident with the hairdryer. No one in their right mind goes on a trip and leaves their hairdryer behind.

And I had packed mine, but Cas took it out of my carry on so she could put an extra laptop and batteries into MY bag without telling me.

My hair had looked like the spikes on a cactus the whole week we were in Barbados.

I had spent a lot of that trip hiding in my bed under a blankie.

And now following her in her mad dash to the car to get plugged back in had led to me ruining my favorite shoes.

I sighed again and wondered why I had given her the car keys in the first place.

After all, friends don't let friends drink and drive, and after the jeep wreck I certainly didn't let Cas tweet and drive, so why hadn't I hung on to the keys?

Now I love Cas more than birthday cake, and that's saying something because for chocolate birthday cake with butter cream icing I'd push my grandma into traffic.

Well, maybe not MY grandma, but someone's grandma for sure.

And here I was at a point where given a choice between spending one more night listening to Cas discuss her blog stats and how many countries she was now being read in and "oh my god Tom Hanks totally tweeted back to me" and metal spikes being shoved into my eyes, I was seriously considering the metal spikes.

Sighing one more time, I went off to have a long hard talk with my friend.

But I'll probably have to tweet her with the news, she's taken to wearing a Bluetooth in both ears …..

20 comments:

Karen from Mentor said...

Many thanks to CG for the term "crackberry"

And many more thanks to Judy and Rachel for listening to me tell them how many countries I'm being read in.

Hey! I only need readers in Greenland and Antarctica to have the whole world under my influence....so if anybody knows anyone living on those two land masses, tweet them my blog address will ya?

hee hee hee .... oh man....

Rachel S said...

Wow... ok...
A) I've never wanted to drive metal spikes in my eyes while talking to you about your stats and the blog... even I do think about 90% of our conversations are about your blog... tee hee.
B)I've forgotten what B was. I got distracted when you called me in the middle of writing my post. You KNOW when I'm posting on here, don't you... that's why you have the uncanny ability to call me as I'm reading or posting this... (eyes you suspiciously) perhaps I went back in time to 1984...

Karen from Mentor said...

Big Brother wasn't involved.

I just still "know" what you're doing at any given time....it's those mom eyes in the back of my head working overtime.

But don't worry they'll probably fall off by the time you're thirty.

And I only think about 70% of our conversations are about my blog. The rest of the time we talk about what Happy ate today, elephants that play the harmonica and how cute your boyfriend and puppies are....

Oh and don't forget all the conversations about aliens.....that would take us down to about 60%, well except for when we're talking about me writing about aliens on my blog....give me a minute...let me get a calculator

[now my head hurts]

:0)

Rougeneck said...

Ah....the beloved Crackberry. They'll have to pry mine from my cold, dead fingers. I'll be tweeting til the very end. Of course, I am about to upgrade to an iPhone. Ah - the apps, the apps, the apps. And so the addiction grows...

Karen from Mentor said...

Hey CG,
They'll probably have way more technologically advanced technostuff by the time you tweet the bucket....you'll probably even be able to shoot lasers out of your eyes by then....[which would actually be pretty cool]

The coolest app that I know of now for the iPhone is downloading ebooks.

Cat's book killerbyte is available on an iPhone app. (that's how I know)

Cause otherwise, since I live in a cave I wouldn't have ANY idea.....

:0)

judy said...

I love the BB story, and the Karen & Rachel after-party even more! I haven't wanted to drive spikes into my eyes either, for the record, but that's partly because I have an aversion to GUSHING eye sockets.

Karen from Mentor said...

Oh good Judy,
I'm glad you're not considering driving spikes into your eyes cause even though bleeding copiously when you're injured in order to freak out villains IS one of your super powers I don't think you should do it.
(THAT was a heck of a sentence)

Rachel's a lot of fun.
And speaking of FUN....

You have fun on vacation!!! Gonna miss you fiercely.

sniff sniff sniff, waily, waily, waily...

[gets slapped by Cher]

I'm ok now.....

Rachel S said...

Creepy! Do me a favor.... make sure those eyes fall out before my wedding night, ok?

Yay I'm fun!!! And waily waily makes me think of the Wee Free Men. They can take our lives but they can't take out trousers!

Karen from Mentor said...

OH MY GOSH RACHEL,

I was innocently eating oatmeal and actually SPEWED IT when I got to "wedding night"!!!!!


I'm reading The Wee Free Men RIIIIIIGHT now.
Get's me in the mood to write YA.

Oh man, you just about killed me....

:0) !!!

Karen from Mentor said...

For anybody new to Bare Bones Story.....

These last five stories were generated from lists of nine or ten random things left by readers in the comment thread of the first bare bones story.

Please feel free to leave a random list in this comment thread if you haven't done so already....

Then check back on Wednesday's for your story.

Thanks!

:0)

Lisa Katzenberger said...

Karen, this is just fantastic! So fun to see what my few words translated to in your mind. You could make a book of this. Great stuff!

Karen from Mentor said...

Thanks Lisa, you gave me a great list to work from. :0)

What shall we call the book?

Confessions of the friend of a Technoholic?

Ooh, maybe it could be a murder mystery...when the narrator went to have the hard talk with Cas she tried to remove the bluetooths and Cas got overwrought, stuggled, fell and hit her head on her external hard drive.....

Anonymous said...

Love it! It's interesting how I just casually though of the words and you made them into a story somehow. Very good, and I love how close to reality it is with most of the problems Cas has :)

PS: I'm trying to see if my e-mail can be added now, but if not, I'll just e-mail you :)

mdvelazquez said...

Love it! Another great job.

Karen from Mentor said...

Hey Estrella,
I enjoyed writing it...the whole twitter extravaganza has given me a LOT of writing inspiration....

I loved your list. Especially the word "blankie" it made me giggle.

glad you liked it.
:0)

Karen from Mentor said...

Hey Maria,
Glad you liked it. I still think that the gag at the end of your bb story is one of my favorites.

All the stories have been a blast to write.

It was interesting combining these two lists.

I wondered at first how I was going to get a snowman and a cactus into the same story though....

Karen :0)

Cat Connor said...

You rock Karen! You really do!!

It's so cool being an iPhone app... I can hardly stand myself. Oh wait... it's not me, it's my book. never mind. Me by proxy! :-)

Karen from Mentor said...

You, your book, same thing Cat. :0)

But I don't actually think you'd fit inside an iPhone unless they folded you real real small....

Cat Connor said...

It'd be kinda like trying to see how many times you can fold paper... with bones lol

Karen from Mentor said...

EWWWW Cat. [laughing]

You're just so blase about folding bodies and crunching bones...it's probably all of those bodies you stuffed into trunks in your books....

well, the one body anyway....

[shaking head and sighing]
these thrill writing crime authors these days...just killing folks left and right with their keyboards [hi Brett] then folding them up and putting them into iPhones and trunks of cars.....where will it all end?