Title: Our job is to give context to the seemingly innocuous
This is a gust post byCalebJRoss as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, pleasecontacthim. To be a groupie and follow this tour,subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb
I’m not sure what the S.S in S.S Michaels stands for, so for the sake of this post, and probably for the rest of my life, I’ll refer to her as Sergeant Symphony Michaels.
So, Sergeant Symphony recently posted a picture, accompanied by a text that riffs on the idea of a context-less photo. Basically, this means allowing ones-self to build a story (or at least an implied story) using only a single, un-cited image. I like this. But I think for the above image the actual buildup to the photo-op itself may be more amusing than anything I could make up.
I passed this sign every day, for years, on the way to work. I would always proceed as the sign suggested, with caution, but for whatever reason—too much sugar in my morning cereal, not enough sleep, too much pot (as one co-worker assumed, falsely)—the idea to create the sign’s literal image hit me hard one morning. That afternoon I traveled across town to a big-box home improvement store and purchased a length of PVC pipe, safety glasses, a black marker, and a can of red spray paint. This would be the second strangest single-store purchase of my life.
The following Saturday, I approached the empty lot, cloaked by the projected confidence of someone on-site to complete a specific job. What job a pipe, some paint, and dark glasses would contribute to, I don’t know. But my intentions must appear purposeful; a single security guard surveyed the premises, even on a weekend, and I assume she hopes each day for a scenario like the one I was about to create. This would be the culmination of her couch-training via seven years of Law and Order reruns.
I’m often accused of lacking motivation when it comes to important things like healthy eating and exercise. But when something absolutely stupid is on the line there’s no stopping me. I once spent four continuous evenings trying to repair a mid-model Teddy Ruxpin doll. I failed, but that’s not the point.
The point is that turning a figurative blind corner into a literal blind corner became a quick and admittedly unreasonably powerful obsession. I think these innocuous outliers of consciousness are what seed many writers, though. We become obsessed, hunting for, as a character in one of my failed stories would say, “that epiphany that turns a single detail into the world.”
