Despertar

the perfect run

I'm not the best person to engage in exercise for exercise's sake. I get too bored too easily. I can do a treadmill, but only if there's a book or a TV to keep me company.

Or, if I have wide open spaces, I can compose stories and test them out orally. Just to see how they sound. I used to do that all the time, when I was little, before I had a good sense of other people's auditory ranges. When one of my parents would drag me to my brother's soccer practice, I would pace the perimeter of the soccer field, chattering away, telling myself stories about characters I had created that, incidentally, almost exactly mimicked the ones in the books I was reading.

A lot of times, I would get fixated on one particular piece of a story I was working on, and I would talk that part out over and over, every time I had a few minutes to myself, in the backyard, on the playground, locked in my bedroom, or whatever, until I had the words pretty much memorized.

I developed all kinds of shorthand to signify the phases of story composition. "Nate" was the shortened version of "No, wait," and it meant Strike that last sentence, I'll start over. "Sert" was short for "Insert," and served basically as an asterisk, indicating the insertion of something I had written earlier and didn't feel like rehashing.

My "perfect run," I guess, was the one time I ever actually finished a whole story, beginning-middle-end, while collecting shells on one of the beaches at the Outer Banks. It was a shit story, about a girl with divorced parents, who escaped her problems by building fake towns out of boxes and ruling over them in such a way that her childish sense of order was satisfied as it never was in real life.

I was a lame kid. But I liked, and still like, the sound of my own voice.

*

More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion to expedite the healing process for this canker sore that's ruining my life? I am desperate for solutions and all out of ideas.