Maria stepped off of the airport curb to hail a cab, and jumped into the first one that stopped. “Lower East Side, Saint Mark’s and Avenue A,” she ordered. She slunk into the seat and sighed, watching the traffic go by.
“Rough trip?” the driver asked.
“Sure,” Maria responded. Just my luck, she said to herself, of all the cabs to hail, I had to get the talkative cabbie. She hoped he got the hint, and as he did not respond, it was apparent he had.
A few minutes into the slow cab ride, Maria found she was bored. She was annoyed before, but stuck in traffic maybe some conversation would be good. She decided to try and hoped the driver did not take offense she blew him off earlier.
“It was an interesting trip,” she started, and hoped he would bite.
“Oh yeah?” the cabbie had responded, with only a slight hint of interest. Maria could not tell if he was truly interested, but went on anyway.
“I spent a few weeks in the rain forest in South America,” and she started her story.
Maria stepped off of the small powerboat onto the beach at the side of the Amazon. She looked at the forest ahead of her, realizing this was going to be a long trip indeed. No roads meant no vehicles; from here to her destination, it was all on foot. Maria felt a prick on her arm, and smacked her arm to kill a rather large mosquito.
She wasn’t even sure why she was here.
As part of her anthropology course, she had agreed to join her professor on this expedition that took her to the heart of no where. Now looking at what lay ahead of her, she regretted ever doing it. In fact she was reconsidering her choice of study. She had some idea that she’d be visiting some remote regions of the planet, but the humidity and the singular pest she had encountered in her first five minutes here were a bit of a turn off.
The boat took off in a hurry. There was no turning back now.
She looked to her left where her professor stood, to discover that while in her daydream he had started walking the path. She hurried after him not wanting to be left behind.
It seemed as if they had been walking for days. The scenery never changed: the forest presented a never ending pattern of green against browns and yellows, the ambient sound that of insects buzzing. Maria and her professor came across no other signs of life.
This had all started as the result of a map found folded inside an old text. The map was clearly of Brazil, with a crude red mark in a region between two marked villages, a few miles inland from the river. Written below the mark was simply the word “them.” No other information was written on the map, and the source was unknown. This did not deter her professor, and he announced an expedition to the Amazon regardless. None of the other students had taken up the offer, dismissing the trip as fantastical and stupid. Right now Maria was wishing she had listened to them.
They walked in silence, although Maria wasn’t quite sure why. She could only guess it was not to attract the attention of any native wildlife, although it was likely such wildlife would avoid contact anyway.
A few hours later, they arrived on what they believe was the area marked on the map. With the dense forest around, Maria was surprised to emerge in a wide open field with grass of approximately two feet tall, with several rows of poorly built hovels, of the kind she had not seen built by humans in at least a century. Maria stood, looking on in amazement. On the other side of the hovels were some fields, in which men were working. Or, at least she thought they were men.
The men stood no taller than four feet when erect, but otherwise looked like any modern human, for the most part. Some stood stooped over. Their clothing was primitive, nothing more than an animal skin for both men and women. Women sat by hovel entrances nursing their young out in the open. The children ran around, playing games with sticks: mock fighting and something that looked like croquet, only with rounded rocks instead of round croquet balls.
Maria took a step forward, and stepped on a branch, breaking it with a loud snapping noise. Professor Johnson turned to her and whispered a harsh “quiet!” but it was already too late. The children stopped playing, and searched for the source of the sound. The women yelled, beckoning for the children to return to the hovels, they themselves heading for the doors. Johnson gave Maria a disapproving glance, and attempted to duck low as to not be seen, tugging at her arm violently for her to get to the ground.
She heard the males yelling, a high pitched kind of shriek, followed by a deep rumble. She was afraid she already knew what that rumble was. She took a risk of looking above the grass to find that the primitive looking men had grabbed improvised weapons, most nothing more than large tree branches, and were charging toward Professor Johnson and Maria. “Oh shit!” Maria yelled as she yanked upward on Professor Johnson’s collar to bring his head up to witness the scene. His face turned white as he saw the red men charging, and grabbing Maria’s arm, began to run as well, back toward the river bank. He was unsure if they would succeed, but he and Maria likely had an advantage of modern fitness and dieting that would allow them to keep ahead of the primitive men, but for how long he was unsure.
Even as they were running, the professor had no reservation in showing his disgust with his student. “Did I really need to tell you to be careful?” he yelled at her as they ran. “A most magnificent find, and we are running from it, and likely to be killed!”
After some time, the professor looked over his shoulder to find they were no longer being followed. “I guess we’ll head back,” he said to Maria with great consternation, “This was a waste.”
Maria and Professor Johnson arrived back at the boat, at which point Johnson said something to the boatman in Spanish and they were off. They arrived at the airport a few hours later, and bought their tickets back home to New York. Maria decided she would withdraw from this particular course, while the Professor said nothing to her the entire plane ride.
“I’m happy to be back,” she told the cabbie, and had not realized her tale had taken the whole taxi ride to her apartment. “Huh,” was the cabbie’s monosyllabic response, obviously disinterested in her story. She paid him, got out of the cab and retrieved her bags from the trunk.
Maria unlocked the door to her first floor apartment. With the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side, and the noise that came with it, this was one time she was glad to have a first floor apartment. She entered and threw her bags on the floor. Her roommate, Elizabeth was waiting for her. “How was your visit to your parents’ house?” Elizabeth asked.
“Boring as usual, and at least that’s over with for the next few months. They are such a pain in the ass. Fuck, I hate Florida so many old people where they are,” Maria said as she slumped down on the couch.
At least now she was home, and could relax.
Some thoughts
Well, I never wanted a blog. I mean really, who wants to read someone else’s bitches and moans and such. I really don’t fancy doing so. Well, some recent thinking has gotten me to do this. Just maybe this once.
Things aren’t honestly where I would like them. I took the job I have now soon after high school because of lack of funds for college. Its a pretty bad job, one that requires pretty much no real intelligence. I feel my mind rotting away, among other things parts of the body. Add to that a constant feeling of depression because its pretty much taken over my life.
In High School, I was pretty creative: I could draw (still pictures and comics) and I wrote some fiction. Its pretty amazing how we can lose this ability, just like a language, when its not used. I’ve learned this first hand. And to be honest, it kind of sucks. I thought of trying to get into doing such things again, maybe it would help me a bit, to be doing something good for the mind and get it off of other things.
Drawing is one of those skills that is hard to recover and required a lot of practice. A lot of practice requires a lot of time, which I do not have. I did not give this one too much thought, and made a half-hearted attempt.
I turned to writing. While not requiring practice per se, this skill is probably harder. In High School, I wrote a mix of my own original short stories, but I may be better known by two friends for my sequel to Jurassic Park. This, of course, was before Michael Crichton wrote the last world. It was decent and enjoyable, for a high school student with not much experience. The title said it all, however: “Return to the Island”. With such a poor title, how good could one expect it to be? A few years later, it was renamed “Puntarenas”, focusing on the coastal town that discovered some weird happenings. Several years later, old material was thrown out, and I started this new story. This new story too was lost to time.
I thought of writing again to maybe give myself something to do, and maybe help me feel better about myself, however little that may accomplish. Which leads me to this post. Finding something to write for the creatively challenged is not too easy. Writing original material is definitely out.
Which leaves me with something called “fan fiction”, something I had considered and the original thought behind this post. There’s the possibility working again on “Puntarenas”. The easy part of doing such a thing is that there’s little development to do: despite being criticized for his ‘cardboard cut-out’ characters (which I can only take to guess pretty typical or maybe bland), Michael Crichton has done that work for me. Continuing, of course, requires real life experience I truly lack, and at this point am mature enough to realize I can not do it. I have never been to Costa Rica, never mind Central America. so how can I wrote about a country, much less a town I have never been to?
Ok, scratch that. I enjoy a series called “Firefly” which had a short run on Fox, and a good candidate as is has a big following. The trouble with writing fan faction for this series is that there already exists an overwhelming amount. I would have to read all of it, because there’s a universe now in existence centered around the series. To be honest, a bit of it is what I would consider poor and hard to read; not that I consider myself even a good writer. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about what one loves; however, the spelling and grammar are poor, and ideas poorly thought out. Then there is some which just annoys me. The original work had made some suggestions about what goes on in the ‘verse: relationships, politics and so on. Many of these authors have decided to follow the path of least resistance, this makes it hard for me to write what I want to. To give an example: there was a suggestion about the relationship between two characters, and those who wrote fan fiction made that relationship a reality, which ultimately fails. Big surprise. Then of course we have to get into the emotional aspect of it, which leaves the main character (unsurprisingly, if he were like everyone else) mopy, which is the antithesis of the character we saw in the show. Would it not have been more interesting to not have that relationship happen at all, and perhaps develop some animosity between the two? I think so. This is what I would write, and now I can’t.
All this thinking about getting started, and now it’s unlikely to happen.